Valeria Luiselli’s latest novel, Beginning Middle End, resists classification with inventive form and a unique relationship to authorship. The novel follows a writer fleeing a difficult divorce, traveling to a remote village in Sicily with her daughter to stay in the home of a lover, who is a pianist away on tour. The two have little contact with anyone outside of the village, except with the writer’s mother who they text with frequently, but otherwise they form a close knit community of two. They read Latin texts, take pictures of their surroundings, write, shop at the local markets, and immerse themselves in the history of this ancient land in which they’ve found themselves.
When the pianist returns, there is a disruption of the shared space between mother and daughter, as their balance is thrown off by his ego and selfishness. He is uninterested in the daughter, who is a bright and curious girl that delights in discussing complicated historical and literary subjects with her mother. His persistence in pulling the mother away from her daughter to engage in increasingly unpleasant sexual encounters generates unwelcome tension and snaps the atmosphere of fierce closeness between mother and daughter. They eventually flee to an even more remote village, where the narrator’s grandmother was born and worked as a day laborer before fleeing Sicily. The mother and daughter explore ancient ruins and imagine the life of their ancestor in this remote but historically weighty setting.
As the novel progresses, intense focus is paid to the natural world in which it is set, with lengthy descriptions of the breeze that blows through windows, the pattern of the tides, and most centrally, the wildfires that are growing increasingly close due to eruptions from Mount Etna. The novel has a unique and immersive atmosphere that gives the reader a more textural sense of the journey that our narrator is on, with tactical details that fill out the day to day lives of the writer and her daughter, and allow us to understand the physical reality that they are grappling with. The novel has frequent allusions to classic Greek and Roman texts, which mother and daughter are frequently reading, discussing, and translating as a way to grow closer to the history of this new place.
Luiselli’s novel is a bewitching tale of a family of women determined to strike out on their own and understand the vast history that preceeded their journey. The novel is a beautiful work of reportage, with fascinating sensory details, printed polaroids, and other unorthodox elements that give it a diaristic quality rather than a more linear narrative. While the novel is certainly about a quest, the short chapters and unique formatting lend it a more free-flowing and unrestrained quality, that feels intensely personal for both the narrator and the reader. A true testament to the power of fiction to challenge the boundaries of narrative and form.