Valeria Luiselli's fourth novel, Beginning Middle End, is propelled by a request from the narrator's daughter: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” This mirrors a similar challenge in Grace Paley's short story A Conversation With My Father, where a father asks his daughter to write a simple story. Luiselli has previously addressed the difficulty of narrative structure in her 2017 essay Tell Me How It Ends, noting that the story of undocumented migrant children “has no beginning, no middle and no end.”
The Journey Begins
The unnamed narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter after a “slow, entangled” divorce. In Munich, she has a coil removed; in Prague, her daughter loses a tooth; near Amsterdam, they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer arrives, they fly to Catania, Sicily, where the narrator's grandmother grew up. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who is away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year.
Plot Points and Mythic Threads
The novel is dense with events: Mount Etna erupts, wildfires rage, and the narrator's mother in Baja California may be developing dementia and possibly planning an act of eco-terrorism. Before leaving for Europe, the narrator's mother gave her a valuable heirloom—a Roman mosaic tile portraying the god Proteus, which the narrator's grandmother took from an excavation site before leaving Sicily. Mother and daughter discuss Proteus's appearance in the Odyssey, and their explorations of myth and classical literature become a central strand. The daughter grows obsessed with returning the mosaic to the ruined villa it came from.
Struggling with Momentum
After a few weeks, the pianist returns, but the narrator's attraction to him rapidly erodes as the sex gets rough, he fights with her daughter, and neglects to help when she gets stung by jellyfish. Despite these events, the novel has trouble gathering momentum—or perhaps isn't interested in doing so. Luiselli breaks the narrative into discrete little segments, like the tesserae from which Proteus's face emerges. The narrator questions what she is writing: “I don't have a clear idea about what I am doing, or what will happen next, not yet,” she admits. “I get entangled in possible beginnings, intricate plots, improvised premises.”
Essayistic and Self-Reflexive
Luiselli's writing has always been essayistic and self-reflexive. She began in 2010 as an essayist with Sidewalks. Her first novel, Faces in the Crowd, blended autofiction and metafiction, portraying its own construction. Her second, The Story of My Teeth, was created in tandem with a group of factory workers, and photographs accompany the text in a Sebaldian touch. Beginning Middle End mirrors her 2019 novel Lost Children Archive, which expanded on Tell Me How It Ends. Both books feature an unnamed narrator whose marriage is collapsing, children with Polaroid cameras, and short titled chapters that prefer essayistic thought to dramatic scenes.
Inward-Looking Yet Universal
The larger contradiction within Luiselli's work is that although the subjects it returns to—the role and status of the mother, migration, the climate crisis—are universal and urgent, it is becoming ever more inward-looking. The most dramatic journey Beginning Middle End describes is whether it can succeed in becoming the book we hold in our hands. In a knowing moment, the narrator's daughter studies the mosaic of Proteus—a shapeshifter, like this novel—“as if she were looking into a mirror or a pool of water, like a little Narcissus peering at himself.” Since finishing the book, it's the image that has persisted most strongly in my memory.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli is published by 4th Estate (£18.99).
