Reviews

• What an inventive, captivating, and thought-provoking story. It has been a long time since I enjoyed a novel this much. A first-rate literary accomplishment! I came to this novel on the recommendation of Audible’s algorithm as I browsed their free audiobooks. I read the summary, I listened to the audio sample, and I looked up the author online. This is her first novel, published in audio in 2014. Intrigued, I promptly downloaded the 5 hour+ audiobook and began to listen. Within a few pages it was obvious I was listening to a stylistically complex novel where the story was shifting back and forth in time and place with no audio clues to distinguish these shifts. I downloaded the Kindle edition to followed along as I listened. A standard procedure for me in this type of storytelling, In the text, the shifts in time and place are indicated by line spacing with an asterisk in the middle of the blank space. Much easier to follow. It is a novel about writing a novel. It is a novel about a young mother in an apartment in Mexico City struggling to write a novel while raising a small boy and a baby girl while deaking with faults, marital and geologic. It is a novel about poets, famous and obscure, from the early twentieth century. It is a novel with a great deal of poetic syntax and rhetoric. It is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young Mexican woman living in Manhatten in the late 20th Century working as a researcher and translator for a small publishing house. It is a biographical novel about scraps of the life of an obscure Mexican poet, Gilberto Owen, who lived in Haarlem in the late 1920s, rubbing elbows with Ezra Pound, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, Duke Ellington, and numerous other poets, and musicians of the time while dealing with a difficult ex-wife who only allows him time with his children on weekend afternoons. It is about the life, death, and odyssey of a potted orange tree. It is a ghost story. It is a novel about the mirror image of reincarnation - the multiple deaths we each experience in a lifetime. In the end, it is a novel about how all the above converge into a marvelous unity in a place I won’t spoil for the reader. Afterward, reflecting on how masterfully this story was written, lines from Whitman’s poem, “On the Beach at Night Alone” came to me. “A vast similitude interlocks all, All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, All distances of place however wide, All distances of time, all inanimate forms, All souls, all living bodies though they are ever so different, or indifferent worlds,...” Highly recommended.

• While the approach to writing this novel is perhaps unique with explanations of a horizontal and vertical style of writing, I found it to be disjointed and confusing. A second reading may result in a more favourable opinion.

• Valeria Luiselli has the power of language enabling her to comfortably master her storyline. Once you will have read this book you'll be waiting for Luiselli's next novel. I bet. Even though Ezra Pond did not live to read Luiselli's book he would have relished the sheer simplicity of her imagery holding her readers captive throughout the novel.

• Good, fast, perfect

• The fragmentary nature of this book made for my fragmentary approach to reading it. I picked it up at spare moments, read a few more pages here and there over several weeks. Luiselli's interweaving of different locations and historical settings is interesting, and I enjoyed the colourful collection of odd ball, arty intellectual types and off-the-wall predicaments that weight the narrative fragments and give them continuity and coherence. That said, each fragment really has its own tantalising mass and energy, something which is down entirely to the sharp and persuasive prose. This is a very clever and unusual literary read.

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