From the Middle End by Valeria Luiselli review – odyssey of mother and daughter | Books

Men Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, an appeal is made to the narrator as Paley. “I want you to write a simple story one more time,” says his father, “the kind that Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov… famous people and writing about what happened to them.” His attempts, and his failure to please her, are the events that give the story its strength. Valeria Luiselli’s fourth book is motivated by a similar request, the daughter of a novelist like Luiselli asks: “Will you finally write a book that has a beginning, a middle, and an end?” It’s a problem that Luiselli has mentioned before. In his 2017 book length essay on undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, he writes that the problem with telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end”.

The beginning of the Middle End shows the writer’s efforts to fit life into a story. The father in Paley’s story would similarly be indifferent. After a “slow, messy” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican-American, embarks on a book tour of Europe with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed from Munich; his daughter has a tooth out in Prague; near Amsterdam he watches children learn to swim with shoes like a flood. When the weather is right, the two fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandfather grew up nearby. She lives in the house of an out-of-town pianist, whom the narrator “had a brief and feverish encounter with” the previous year.

This book may sound like a conspiracy: Etna is erupting. Wildfires are raging. The narrator’s mother, in Baja California, may be suffering from dementia and is planning a terrorist attack. Before the narrator left for Europe, his mother gave him a precious heirloom, a Roman tile depicting the god Proteus; The narrator’s grandfather took it from the quarry before leaving Sicily.

Mother and daughter discuss the appearance of Proteus in the Odyssey, their exploration of mythology and ancient texts being the central thread. The narrator’s daughter grows obsessed with returning the painting to the ruined house it came from.

A few weeks after the pianist’s return, the narrator’s attraction begins to wane as sex becomes difficult, he fights with his daughter, and neglects to help her when she is stung by a jellyfish. Even so, the book has trouble building interest – or perhaps it doesn’t want to. Paley’s essayist calls conspiracy “the absolute line between two principles which I have always despised”. Luiselli seems to feel the same way, breaking his story down into small tesserae-like parts from which Proteus’s face emerges.

Always, the narrator questions what he is writing. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, or what will happen next,” he admits. “I’m obsessed with possible beginnings, complex plots, well-planned environments.” Later he wonders if the project is not a book but a story. “Perhaps the middle doesn’t fit the book’s rigid structure, the corset of the plot. The middle feels too much like the distracted, loose, impetuous spirit of the story. This persistent familiar problem is resolved only when the daughter takes control of the story.

Luiselli’s writings have always been literary and self-explanatory. Instead, he started in 2010 as a storyteller and music producer for Sidewalks. His first novel, Faces in the Crowd, is a mix of fiction and non-fiction – a novel that reflects his own constructions, as Beginning Middle End does – and is a fictionalized account of the life of a real Mexican poet. His second, The Story of My Teeth , is also part of his construction: in the text of the author Luiselli explains how the book was created together with a group of factory workers. In a Sebaldian touch, pictures accompany the words.

In many ways Starting from the Middle End mirrors Luiselli’s previous book, 2019 Lost Children Archiveitself a fictional expansion of Tell Me How It Ends. The story is divided between an unnamed woman, whose family is falling apart, and her stepson, who is talking to his stepsister. At the beginning of Middle End the unnamed narrator’s marriage has ended, and his daughter is writing postcards to her stepbrother. In both books the text is divided into short chapters, which opt for narrative ideas rather than dramatic events. All of these children have Polaroid cameras, their photos provide a wordless perspective on each book. There is another clear link, which divides the narrators of these books surprisingly, but reveals that it is a spoiler.

The main contradiction between Luiselli’s work is that although the subjects that return – the role and responsibility of women, migration, the climate problem – are common and urgent, they are clearly internal. The most fascinating journey that Beginning Middle End describes is that it might as well be the book we have in our hands. In the moment of knowing, the narrator’s daughter studies the paintings of Proteus – changing form, like the book – “as if looking into a mirror or a pool of water, like a young Narcissus watching himself”. Ever since I finished this book, it’s an image that has stuck with me.