Faces in the Crowd

A woman trapped in a house in Mexico City is obsessed with Gilberto Owen in an apartment in Harlem with a dead orange tree. Gilberto Owen in an apartment in Harlem with a dead orange tree is obsessed with Emily Dickinson who is a woman trapped in a house. Both the woman and Gilberto see ghosts.

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Both Gilberto and the woman are ghosts. Both have died many times and go on dying and seeing each other across time.

I enjoyed the experience of reading this book. I liked the layering and the sense that time is fluid and existence overlaps.

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This book mostly follows a woman with two kids (“the baby” and “the boy”) and a husband (I don't think we learn any of their names). She used to be a translator (of written works) in New York City and much of the anecdotes are her remembrances of her life then. There are other anecdotes by

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at least one other person... maybe two? Someone had an ex-wife and kids and someone (else? not sure) had three cats. I'm not sure any of the main characters had names.

It was kind of hard to follow/figure out which anecdotes belonged to whom in some cases. Nothing really happened throughtout the entire book. Just these little anecdotes. The anecdotes of at least two of the people (both?) come together in a weird meld at the end. I also didn't like the characters, especially the woman. She was a liar and a thief. I mostly did pay attention to this one, but I didn't like the style at all, in addition to there not really being any kind of story to it. Luckily, it was short.

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In a kind of revery, a young latin novelist working as a translator at a small publishing house in New York, begins a project to translate poems of another expatriate latin poet who died seventy years earlier. But her “translations” are in fact mere inventions (though the “mere” may not

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apply). She identifies so closely with this dead latin poet that her novel becomes a translation, as it were, of his life, interspersed with a quasi-autobiographical account of her own writing of the novel. The storylines — fictional, autobiographical, translation, and forgery — become increasingly blurred. And all is interwoven with a very knowing post-modern sprinkling of references (either reverential or ironic) to philosophers (especially Wittgenstein) and poets (especially Pound) and others.

This is fresh and poetic writing that washes over readers even as they are held at bay due to the rapidly alternating storylines. It might not be sustainable in a long novel, but in this short novel form it holds its charms. Gently recommended.

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From a review on the reverse of the book by Laura Van Den Berg ”A masterwork of fractured identities and shifting realities, Faces in the Crowd, is a lyric meditation on love, mortality, ghosts, and the desire to transform our human wreckage into art, to be saved by creation.”

A novel with three

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different narrators in three different places and three different times. The first is a young mother in current Mexico City and remembering her days as a translator in New York City; the second is a young translator in Harlem looking for what she can find of the mostly-forgotten poet Gilberto Owen. The third and last is Gilberto Owen himself living in Philadelphia in the 1950’s. And yet objects such as dead potted plants and a table ruined in the Mexican earthquake, and even people – ghosts from the future and the past - move between the various settings and time points.

Mostly this one confused me and left me questioning what was happening. After a group discussion of this novel, I felt it was intriguing and perhaps I should reread it in order to appreciate it more.

But I haven’t. And I probably won’t. Perhaps this one is just too subtle for me

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Generally well-written and lively style. The overlapped narrative seems essential at some points and annoying/tedious at other times.

The book was very interesting and definitely had me thinking a lot. Though it was hard to follow which narrator was speaking in which vignette, but I think that may be the point in a way? Also, with all the literary and historical figures mentioned through the book it was hard to know if I was

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missing out on understanding some things by not knowing about those people.

I was very intrigued though by the style of the book because I don't think I've read a book before told purely through vignettes with no sections or anything to give structure to the book. There were also lots of descriptions and lines that were really insight and compelling so I am interested in trying another book by this author in the future.

Content Warning: sex and masturbation, racism/racist language, stereotyping people based on race, suicide, fat-phobic language, and I think other things that I'm probably forgetting

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