Name: Gary Homewood's review of Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli
Item: Faces in the Crowd
Rating: 5
Author: Gary Homewood

Valeria Luiselli

Collapsing narratives and the perils of translation from "one of the most important new voices in Mexican writing" (Alma Guillermoprieto).

Faces in the Crowd

Abigail Auvray

Gary Homewood

A young mother in Mexico writing a novel, mixed with autobiography of her time in New York, and her obsession with an obscure poet in Harlem in the 20's. Well constructed experimental metafiction, slowly becomes stranger and more haunting as narrative threads intertwine.

Rifqaiza Pravangesta

In the heart of Mexico City a woman, trapped in a house and a marriage she can neither fully inhabit nor abandon, thinks about her past.She has decided to write a novel about her days at a publishing house in New York; about the strangers who became lovers and the poets and ghosts who once lived in her neighbourhood. In particular, one of the obsessions of her youth - Gilberto Owen - an obscure Mexican poet of the 1920s, a marginal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a busker on Manhattan's subway platforms, a friend and an enemy of Federico Garca Lorca. As she writes, Gilberto Owen comes to life on the page: a solitary, faceless man living on the edges of Harlem's writing and drinking circles at the beginning of the Great Depression, haunted by the ghostly image of a woman travelling on the New York subway. Mutually distorting mirrors, their two lives connect across the decades between them, forming a single elegy of love and loss.

Abigail Auvray &
Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

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Abigail Auvray &Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

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Abigail Auvray &
Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli