Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novels and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney鈥檚. Some of her recent projects include a ballet libretto for the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center in 2010; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.
I have to say I admire Valeria Luiselli鈥檚 mind after reading this conglomeration of thoughts about cities (in particular Mexico City and Venice), writing and writers, reading, learning a language, cycling, walking, flying, maps, and graves. This most definitely falls into that category of work that I call an 鈥渋deas鈥� book. These are individual essays, but even within a single essay her thoughts stray from one idea to the next. Like those other writers I鈥檝e read recently that have honed in on city life, Luiselli also notes the feeling of isolation. (I鈥檓 just noticing how many of these 鈥渃ity鈥� books I鈥檝e read this year, considering all the reading choices out there 鈥� yes, perhaps I鈥檝e become a bit obsessed with the idea of city life.)
鈥淢exico City or New York, the city as an ocean of sidewalks and buildings, as a form of puzzle on a map鈥攖he writing of the contemplative loner in the urban behemoth is never entirely free from melancholy.鈥�
There was enough here to pique my curiosity and interest in this author. However, Sidewalks merely served as an appetizer. It satisfied me just enough as a starter, but I need something heartier to fill me up. I had to refer back to my highlights to recall some of her more interesting points, of which there were indeed several. By no means is this meant to be a negative critique of her work, but a simple yearning for more of it, for something with a tighter framework to hold it all together a bit more perhaps. I have a copy of her novel titled Lost Children Archive and will reach for that one next. For now, I鈥檒l share a couple of the intelligent passages that solidified my interest in her writing.
鈥淚f the cranium were what it seems to be鈥攁 hemispherical receptacle, a cavity, a reservoir鈥攍earning would be a way of filling an empty space. But that鈥檚 not what actually happens. It鈥檚 possible to imagine that every new impression digs another hole, bruises the unformed material a bit, empties us out a little more. We鈥檙e born full of something鈥攇ray matter, water, blood, flesh鈥攁nd in all of us, at every instant, the slow alchemy of erosion and loss is at work.鈥�
鈥淭hat book on the bed is a generous and undemanding lover; that other one, on the bedside table, an infallible oracle I consult from time to time, or a talisman against midnight crises; the one on the couch, a pillow for long, dreamless naps. Some books get forgotten for months. They鈥檙e left in the bathroom or on top of the fridge in the kitchen for a while and are replaced by others when our indifference eventually wears them away. The few we really do read are places we always return to.鈥�
Perfection is not the reason we enjoy the books we love, and what connects us to these books is more mysterious than what is written within them, as what resonates most with us in the books we love is almost always between the words, around them, outside of their inky delineations. For we bring more to the books we love than those books bring to us, and to steal an image from this book, they are like the windows of our homes at night reflecting back our own interiors, the purview they open upon visible but indistinct and always overlayed with the images we have collected inside, where we dwell. Or, the experience of reading a book is never completed, as the act of reading only speaks to the incompleteness of the book or ourselves - a book speaks to a mutual emptiness that is explored by the act of reading.
So while I am tempted to do so, I will not say Sidewalks is a perfect 110 pages. But it is a beautiful reflection of a richly imaginative interior, overlaying its view onto multiple exterior spaces. It is a book I would have liked to have written myself.
Valeria Luiselli here is situating herself in a lineage that reaches back at least to Poe鈥檚 Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire鈥檚 Painter of Modern Life, that of the flaneur - the meandering observer of the phantasmal, shifting essences of the city. Her concern in Sidewalks is a kind of unification of cartography and language, Wittgenstein鈥檚 city of words, by way of a thought-transparency placed over Mexico City, Venice, and New York (her three main loci of habitation here), a transparency perhaps analogous to the system of rivers and roads that are mapped across a human brain by neurons and axons and dendrites that together achieve the network of imagination. The guiding spirits are Benjamin, Baudelaire, Walser, Pessoa, Brodsky, Bola帽o, Wittgenstein, Sebald, any number of emigres either of place or imagination, those forever wandering literary ghosts, whom she cites throughout as signposts to the timeless oases of the written word, that greatest bulwark against the oblivion of dissolution. Luiselli is especially concerned with absences in urban or linguistic environments, how these blank spaces in cities or sentences open up possibilities, become places of conjecture, inhabited by itinerant, transient people or thoughts, where the wandering desires or detritus of the city end up collecting in piles of rubble or thought-rubble, and how these defintion-less spaces reflect our own incomplete attempts at Being. The interior and the exterior, of buildings or human beings, are of prime concern, the blurred border between them, if existing at all, the narrowing or inverted border between the private and the public - doormen and guardians of portals take unusual precedence and attention in her imaginative realm. Relingos, empty spaces in urban areas, vague terrain without explicit use or ownership, are Luiselli鈥檚 preferred haunts of speculation. Rivers, too, that invariably shape the destiny of the map of a city. Rivers, relingos, streets, buildings in the process of being constructed or torn down, abandoned libraries and empty facades, make up the visage of the city she wanders and inform her particular nostalgia (saudade) for an impossible-mythic home for her (and our) inevitably rootless lives.
There is a startling unity to this book, it feels all of a piece, its components speak with each other. It begins and ends in San Michele cemetery, searching out Brodsky鈥檚 grave, and the impossibility of words to hold on to that which we wish they held more than anything- ourselves. That words alienate us from our world from the first utterance, that the great city of words humanity has constructed ultimately only tells us nothing, or, ironically, intimates to us things we cannot capture in words, is another thread tying these disparate essays together. Call it a miniature, deeply personal Arcades Project.
Luiselli is a young writer, but if Sidewalks is some kind of manifesto or declaration of intent, she is a writer whose career I will follow with great attention. She feels of the old world, the receding world of the grandeur of the imagination clearly perceiving the rhythms of human life, a melancholy eye wide-open to interpreting experience into words, a perspective that is in constant danger of being lost to the obfuscation of gadgetry, machinery, the frantic pace and fractured thinking of postmodern existence. She is a writer we need now more than ever.
~
鈥漌e are in the process of losing something. We go round leaving bits of dead skin on the sidewalk, dropping dead words into a conversation. Cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction. But this constant threat of earthquakes is all that鈥檚 left to us. Only that kind of scene- a landscape of rubble piled on rubble- compels us to go out and look for the last remaining things. Only under that threat does it again become necessary to excavate language, to find the exact word.鈥�
When we have only a partial knowledge of a language, the imagination fills in the sense of the word, a phase or a paragraph (p.42)
This was a lot of fun, and very quotable, it is a literary book , but above all a digression around nothing. Her digression digresses from attempting to find Brodsky's grave in Venice to considering Mexico city - what shape is it, what fruit is it, does it have a centre, it's missing lakes, it's vacant plots, from where she digresses us into learning Portuguese and French, the ignorant absences in the learners knowledge as they embark on learning a language. We sense all these empty spaces on maps, in cities, in graveyards, in language that we fill with our imagination. She digresses into movement - the bicycle is an ideal for her, a bicycle is an arrangement of empty spaces too in a way powered by hope and imagination, unless it is a assembly of metal and rubber powered by the legs.
If that sounds crazy, it is, but it works. She says a lot even though she is frequently writing about nothing. This is a woman for whom every book she reads is a journey.
Coming from reading one thing that does stand out dramatically is that the default person in this book is always a man - the urban pedestrian, the imaginative cyclist, the writer, the reader, they are all men. I wondered if the murder of women in Mexico had reached such a level that a woman is not to be seen neither on the streets nor in the pages of a book?
The difference between flying in an airplane, walking, and riding a bike is the same as that between looking through a telescope, a microscope, and a movie camera. Each allows for a particular way of seeing. From an airplane, the world is a distant representation of itself. On two legs, we are condemned to a plethora of microscopic detail. But the person suspended over two wheels, a meter above the ground, can see things as if through the lens of a movie camera: he can linger on minutiae and choose to pass over what is unnecessary.
I loved this little collection of essays, dense with aphorism and anecdote. The reader travels with Luiselli on foot or bicycle on sidewalks in Venice, Mexico City, New York; imagines moving into and out of apartments; considers the nature of relingos, oddly-shaped pieces of land, of unknown or vague ownership, on the edges of urban public areas. She is always reminded of a pertinent and provocative observation of Brodsky, Pound, Pessoa, Beckett, Barthes, Duras, Sebald, Unamuno. She is always thinking about reading and writing.
I suddenly lose the will to continue writing. I get up from the desk, impatient and defeated, and go to the bookcase. With the persistence of a mosquito around a lightbulb, I prowl the shelves in search of that book, that page, that underlined phrase I vaguely remember, but which-if I could only reread it-would finally give me the confidence to complete my recently abandoned idea.
Dieci capitoli brevi, come tappe di un unico viaggio che parte da Venezia, dalla tomba di Iosif Brodskij, e si conclude a Venezia, con la Luiselli che si ritrova per una serie di circostanze sia sfavorevoli sia favorevoli ad ottenere la residenza a Venezia.
Un libro ricco di suggestioni, di citazioni di autori e di libri che amo, con una naturalezza che le 猫 propria: lei non cita, ammiccando al lettore, perch茅 鈥渃os矛 fa figo鈥�; lei va da un autore all鈥檃ltro perch茅 quelli sono i suoi riferimenti, come la scatola delle riserve energetiche da cui attingere per continuare ad andare avanti.
Da Venezia si sposta in Messico, per poi percorrerlo in bicicletta, e approfitta di questo 鈥渢empo鈥� per passare dalla camminata, come della 鈥減oetica del pensiero鈥�, alla saudade, dalla nostalgia, al linguaggio, dalla scrittura allo spazio pubblico/privato, dalla citt脿 ai relingos (angoli di citt脿 svuotati, che hanno perso la propria funzione originaria).
鈥淪crivere: trapanare pareti, spaccare finestre, far esplodere edifici. Scavi profondi per trovare - trovare cosa? - non trovare niente. Scrittore 猫 colui che distribuisce silenzi e vuoti. Scrivere: fare spazio alla lettura. Scrivere: fare relingos.鈥�
脠 davvero una grande scrittrice, per intelligenza, sensibilit脿, curiosit脿 esplorativa, arte del saper narrare e soprattutto perch茅 ha fatto tesoro dentro di s茅 di tutti i grandi scrittori di cui si 猫 nutrita negli anni.
Debido al trabajo de sus padres Luiselli lleva una vida bastante err谩tica. A los seis a帽os, el inicio de la lectoescritura ser谩 en ingl茅s ya que en ese momento se encontraba en Corea. Con el tiempo ella decide volver a M茅xico para estudiar filosof铆a en la universidad. Papeles Falsos es un libro de ensayos. Un libro dedicado a M茅xico, una manera de colocarse en su ciudad mediante la escritura, una vuelta a su lengua materna. Nos lleva desde la cartograf铆a mexicana a un paseo en bicicleta desde su casa a la librer铆a habl谩ndonos de: la saudade "recuerda a esas cosas que son bellas o un poco tristes: las naos, los sauces, el sahumerio, el saurio", de la nostalgia y la melancol铆a, mientras intenta hacerse hueco en la ciudad. Luiselli va en bibi porque si bien los activistas del paseo han asociado esta actividad con la literatura ( paseos de rousseau, los vagabundeos de walser hasta los modernos fl芒neurs), el peat贸n defe帽o lleva la ciudad a cuestas sumergido en la vor谩gine urbana y tan solo los ancianos, ni帽os y vendedores ambulantes pueden permitirse una " velocidad de paseo". La Ciudad de M茅xico est谩 llena de huecos, vacios que se llaman relingos (nuestros descampados) Escribir podr铆a asociarse a rellenar relingos, quiz谩s la lectura tambi茅n pueda asociarse a rellenar esos vacios, en una ciudad y una escritura que se vuelve fr谩gil ante el recuerdo del temblor. "Hay textos que ser谩n siempre nuestros callejones sin salida; fragmentos que ser谩n un puente". (Y todo lo que no hemos le铆do:un relingo:el vac铆o en el coraz贸n de la ciudad).
Hay libros que generan curiosidad por seguir leyendo sobre alg煤n tema o escritor y este es uno de ellos
鈥淢a la nostalgia non 猫 sempre nostalgia di un preterito. Esistono luoghi che ci provocano nostalgia a prescindere. Luoghi che sappiamo perduti non appena ci arriviamo; luoghi in cui ci sappiamo pi霉 felici di quanto non lo saremo mai. In questi luoghi l'anima si sdoppia in una specie di simulacro involontario per guardare il proprio presente in retrospettiva. Come un occhio che vede se stesso guardarsi da un tempo futuro, l'occhio guarda da lontano il suo presente e lo anela鈥�.
Valeria Luiselli, autrice e interprete cosmopolita, dialoga oggi con Anna Lombardi sulle pagine di Robinson, in occasione dell'uscita del suo nuovo libro. Carte False 猫 stato invece pubblicato da La nuova frontiera qualche anno fa, ma mantiene immutata la combinazione di ingenuit脿 e intelligenza che Nooteboom attribuiva alla sua maniera di scrivere. Naturale osservare la differenza del contesto culturale e politico tra ieri e oggi. In questi saggi filosofici e poetici, Luiselli pu貌 dedicarsi con serenit脿 ai sentimenti, alla vita, al tempo e alla letteratura. La scrittrice studia la mappa di Citt脿 del Messico, somiglia a una macchia d'acqua, a un albero dalle mille radici, con il rio Churubusco e il Tacubaya; le frontiere urbane incontrano la resistenza ai confini di un corpo di territori polverosi e carne stradale, che cresce in infiniti particolari e costante mutamento. Luiselli scrive veloce e silenziosa, cerca volti sconosciuti tra la folla, visita luoghi che si erodono lentamente, frammenti che si frammentano, caverne che si trasformano in soglie. Le passseggiate che facciamo leggendo tracciano gli spazi che abitiamo nell'intimit脿. Il lettore pu貌 ritornare con la memoria nei luoghi visitati, richiamare al cuore la loro essenza. In compagnia di Brodskij, Luiselli esplora i terreni marginali, gli avanzi urbani, dove lo scrivere accede all'alleanza tra memoria e immaginazione; e interroga i guardiani di notte, unici superstiti dell'inabissarsi di privacy e pubblico, per cercare di riconoscersi in altre stanze, altri specchi, altri spazi, sondando s茅 stessa. Venezia, citt脿 senza ombre e senza radici, diventa biografica e emozionale, un dentro e un fuori, nel quale abitare simultaneamente realt脿 e astrazione, significato e strumento, tenendo in vita il peso dei passi falsi e l'incertezza delle intuizioni.
鈥淗anno ammazzato un uomo davanti a casa mia. Una sola pallottola nella schiena, all'altezza dell'ombelico. A terra ha sbattuto prima il cranio. Un colpo secco contro il cemento; il marciapiede ancora umido dalla pioggia del pomeriggio. La testa non si rompe tanto facilmente come il filo che ci lega: 猫 rimasta intatta, i capelli tirati indietro con il gel, una pettinatura perfetta; i denti in vista, sporgenti come quelli di un bambino un po' ritardato. Il giorno dopo, 猫 apparsa sull'asfalto la sagoma disegnata con il gesso bianco. Avr脿 tremato la mano di chi ha tracciato i bordi del suo corpo? La citt脿, i suoi marciapiedi: un'enorme lavagna; invece di numeri si sommano corpi鈥�.
Kay谋p 脟ocuk Ar艧ivi ve Bana Sonunu S枚yle kitaplar谋n谋 okuyup hayran kald谋臒谋m Valeria Luiselli'nin Sahte Belgeler kitab谋 k谋sa k谋sa yaz谋lar谋ndan olu艧uyor. Luiselli birbirinden 莽ok da kopuk olmayan, k谋sa ba艧l谋klarla ayr谋lan b枚l眉mlerden olu艧an kitab谋nda bir flan枚z gibi 艧ehrin ve hayat谋n nabz谋n谋 tutuyor. Kimi zaman mezarl谋klarda, kimi zaman bisikletle, kimi zaman tamir edilen binas谋nda onun zihnine konuk oluyoruz. Bana birazc谋k Lauren Elkin'in Flan枚z'眉n眉 biraz da Rebecca Solnit'in metinlerini hat谋rlatt谋 diyebilirim. Alt谋n谋 莽izdi臒im bir莽ok paragraf, yeni 枚臒rendi臒im bir s眉r眉 艧ey oldu. Metafizik kelimesine dair anlat谋lan anektodu bilmiyordum 枚rne臒in. Bir de ben bu ay Ferda Keskin'in Neo Skola'daki Tarihte Melankoli E臒itimi'ni ald谋m. Melankolinin tarihine bu kitapta da k谋sa bir b枚l眉mde olsa da denk gelmek benim i莽in taze bilgilerimin peki艧mesini de i莽eren tatl谋 bir tesad眉f oldu. :)
Valeria Luiselli'yi daha 枚nce okumam谋艧 olanlar谋n da okumaktan keyif alaca臒谋, farkl谋 bak谋艧 a莽谋lar谋n谋 kazanman谋z谋 sa臒layacak bir eser. Ben epey sevdim.
"Sokakta art谋k yaln谋zl谋kla ileti艧im kuram谋yoruz, kendi evlerimizde bile, zaten yetersiz olan dikkatimizi talep eden bilgisayarlar谋n pencereleri veya beynimizin arka bah莽esine yerle艧en kom艧ular olmadan kendimizle ba艧 ba艧a kalam谋yoruz -i艧te yine kar艧谋daki 艧i艧man adam buzdolab谋n谋 a莽谋yor, sekizinci kattaki topuklular谋n谋 giydi, bir di臒eri neon g眉ne艧inin alt谋nda 莽al谋艧谋yor h芒l芒- dolay谋s谋yla tek se莽ene臒imiz ba艧ka alanlarda k眉莽眉k, ge莽ici yak谋nl谋klar in艧a etmek."
A slim volume but worth the price of admission. Luiselli's writing is at once syntactically idiosyncratic, pithy and lean.
The introduction calls these essays, but to my mind they are more properly termed literary meditations or extended aphorisms.
I'm not sure exactly how to capture what Luiselli's up to here. She plays with ideas. She toys with narrative. She philosophizes lightly. She inks stylish gauzy speculations.
I read much of this in the last minutes of wakefulness, some sinking into my being via the subconscious, some lost to the waning focus of sleep-burning-eyes.
I enjoyed Luiselli's referentialism as she and I share similar tastes.
If I have a quibble it's this: she picks up lines from here and there (and they're good ones) but chooses to deliver them as tossed off, floating in some region of her mind, rather than giving you the proper citation:
"This would be fortunate, if only these words by either Walter Benjamin or Friedrich Nietzsche--I never know which--were true: 'To be happy is to become aware of oneself without fright'" (93).
And
"'Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am unable to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning,' wrote Wittgenstein somewhere" (52).
The first is Benjamin, but why make me look it up? Perhaps it's always good to conjure Nietzsche. But the second, from Wittgenstein's notebooks, makes me wonder if it was picked up in a secondary source or a felicitous googling. And I don't want that kind of cynicism creeping in. Were the notebooks blue or brown? That's not too much to ask, is it?
Nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed this, and I'm a little bit in love with her.