In Valeria Luiselli’s New Novel, the Past Never Stays Behind
By
Daniela Ordoñez Delgado
“Beginning, Middle, End” crosses Sicily and Mexico, memory and imagination, to dissolve all borders between them.
Find a bookshelf, close your eyes, and ask it a question. To get an answer, choose any book and land your eyes on the passage that feels right. In Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, Beginning, Middle, End, a recently divorced novelist plays this game with her daughter. With so much to say about this book, I played the game, too. I landed on this passage, a conversation between the two of them about the characters in the mother’s new novel: Is that mother and daughter you and me Or you and your mother Neither. It’s a narrator and a character. Is it a ghost...
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