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    Faces in the Crowd
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    Faces in the Crowd
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    Faces in the Crowd
    Ebook178 pages2 hours

    Faces in the Crowd

    By Valeria Luiselli

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the author of Lost Children Archive: “Masterful…a novel in which people die many times just to wake up right where they left off.”―The Paris Review
     
    In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains. Valeria Luiselli's debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction.

    “An extraordinary new literary talent.”—The Daily Telegraph

    "In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy…Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage—and then, in the book's second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer.”—Francisco Goldman

    “Haunting…Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition." —Publishers Weekly
     
    “Lovely and eccentric…peppered with arresting imagery.”—The New York Times
     
    “Reminiscent of Roberto Bolano and Andre Gide, Luiselli navigates a dynamic, ghostly world between worlds, crisscrossing fact and fiction. Few books are as sure to baffle, surprise, and reward readers as the strange, shifty experiment that is Luiselli’s fiction debut.”―Booklist
     
    One of Electric Literature’s 25 Best Novels of the Year
    One of Largehearted Boy’s Favorite Novels of the Year

    Editor's Note

    Book club pick…

    For Hispanic Heritage Month, writers John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas chose Valeria Luiselli’s novel about novels for their book club, Life’s Library. “Faces in the Crowd” is “Concerned, above all, with literature's ability to transcend time and space,” according to a review from Mina Holland in The Guardian.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 21, 2014
    ISBN9781566893558
    Unavailable
    Faces in the Crowd

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    Reviews for Faces in the Crowd

    3.5/5

    89 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Generally well-written and lively style. The overlapped narrative seems essential at some points and annoying/tedious at other times.
    • 2/5
      This book mostly follows a woman with two kids (“the baby” and “the boy”) and a husband (I don't think we learn any of their names). She used to be a translator (of written works) in New York City and much of the anecdotes are her remembrances of her life then. There are other anecdotes by at least one other person... maybe two? Someone had an ex-wife and kids and someone (else? not sure) had three cats. I'm not sure any of the main characters had names. It was kind of hard to follow/figure out which anecdotes belonged to whom in some cases. Nothing really happened throughtout the entire book. Just these little anecdotes. The anecdotes of at least two of the people (both?) come together in a weird meld at the end. I also didn't like the characters, especially the woman. She was a liar and a thief. I mostly did pay attention to this one, but I didn't like the style at all, in addition to there not really being any kind of story to it. Luckily, it was short.
    • 3/5
      In a kind of revery, a young latin novelist working as a translator at a small publishing house in New York, begins a project to translate poems of another expatriate latin poet who died seventy years earlier. But her “translations” are in fact mere inventions (though the “mere” may not apply). She identifies so closely with this dead latin poet that her novel becomes a translation, as it were, of his life, interspersed with a quasi-autobiographical account of her own writing of the novel. The storylines — fictional, autobiographical, translation, and forgery — become increasingly blurred. And all is interwoven with a very knowing post-modern sprinkling of references (either reverential or ironic) to philosophers (especially Wittgenstein) and poets (especially Pound) and others.This is fresh and poetic writing that washes over readers even as they are held at bay due to the rapidly alternating storylines. It might not be sustainable in a long novel, but in this short novel form it holds its charms. Gently recommended.
    • 4/5
      slight and full of echoes and ghosts, and the warped edges of the negative space around the story - achingly sad.
    • 3/5
      From a review on the reverse of the book by Laura Van Den Berg ”A masterwork of fractured identities and shifting realities, Faces in the Crowd, is a lyric meditation on love, mortality, ghosts, and the desire to transform our human wreckage into art, to be saved by creation.”A novel with three different narrators in three different places and three different times. The first is a young mother in current Mexico City and remembering her days as a translator in New York City; the second is a young translator in Harlem looking for what she can find of the mostly-forgotten poet Gilberto Owen. The third and last is Gilberto Owen himself living in Philadelphia in the 1950’s. And yet objects such as dead potted plants and a table ruined in the Mexican earthquake, and even people – ghosts from the future and the past - move between the various settings and time points.Mostly this one confused me and left me questioning what was happening. After a group discussion of this novel, I felt it was intriguing and perhaps I should reread it in order to appreciate it more.But I haven’t. And I probably won’t. Perhaps this one is just too subtle for me
    • 3/5
      A woman trapped in a house in Mexico City is obsessed with Gilberto Owen in an apartment in Harlem with a dead orange tree. Gilberto Owen in an apartment in Harlem with a dead orange tree is obsessed with Emily Dickinson who is a woman trapped in a house. Both the woman and Gilberto see ghosts. Both Gilberto and the woman are ghosts. Both have died many times and go on dying and seeing each other across time.I enjoyed the experience of reading this book. I liked the layering and the sense that time is fluid and existence overlaps.

      1 person found this helpful