we made it to the end but i’m still a little lost? – Faces in the Crowd

Hi everyone! Welcome back to our final week of reading! To end us off, I decided to read ‘Faces in the Crowd’ by Valeria Luiselli. Unfortunately, I can’t necessarily say that I loved this book, which is too bad because I was really hoping to end on a fun note. However, I still found parts of this book interesting to read and think about, so let’s get into those!

Firstly, if you’ve been keeping up with my blog since the beginning, you’ll know just how important it is for me to enjoy a writing style when getting into a book. However, I was definitely a bit more confused reading, just because at times things got a little confusing for me with the different aspects of the story, such as about the life of the translator, and Owen, the poet. When she’s describing her writing, and she moves about her life and home in the very early pages, I felt as if the tone was more calm but at times, particularly at the end, when we’re shocked by an earthquake, I found myself confused and had to turn back to see if I missed something. Now, this may have been due to external factors like where I was when reading, but to me, was something that stuck out to me as I was reading. 

Another aspect I found particularly interesting in the text were the ghosts, and their presence in the lives of the opposing narrator. I thought it really added to some of the intrigue of the text, simply because ghosts are so often a symbol for representing ominous or eerie things. In this text rather, they were more of a connection between the two worlds, and as the lecture states, indicates a merging of the two narrators, connecting the settings they operate in. 

Overall, I have pretty mixed feelings on this book, largely in part to the fact that I struggled to get through it. However, one thing that really helped bring me a little closer to the story and connect more with the text was the lecture, particularly the emphasis on “burrowing through space”, and the emphasis on the matter of life and death being based on a viewpoint. The emphasis on the spatial and temporal elements of the story also add to my previous point on the ghosts, whose addition to the story help mirror that idea of life and death of both the narrators.

My question for you guys this week is ‘do you guys think that the ghosts are the respective narrators or are they meant to represent something different?

Thank you all for following along with me in this course, I thoroughly enjoyed getting to engage with texts I never thought I would read!