On the first page of Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel, “Lost Children Archive,” the narrator wonders how she and her husband, their marriage decaying, will someday explain their story to their two children, because “the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we’ll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.” While “Lost Children Archive” is an urgent, essential 21st-century masterpiece, it doesn’t provide answers or a proper ending for any of its characters, which lends Luiselli’s new novel — her first in seven years — an extra bit of intrigue since it’s titled “Beginning Middle End.”
This latest work can certainly be appreciated independently, but is very closely tied to “Lost Children Archive,” continuing the story of that novel’s narrator and her daughter, who are spending the summer in Italy. This time around, mother and daughter have names, Ella and Manuela Camposanto, which are laden with symbolism: Camposanto is Spanish for graveyard, and Ella Camposanto is the name of the fictional Italian author of “Elegies for Lost Children,” the novel-within-a-novel in “Lost Children Archive.” Encounters with refugees — as well as Italian xenophobia — early in “Beginning Middle End” makes it seem as if Luiselli might also be set on addressing the so-called European migrant crisis similar to the way she so affectingly wrote about unaccompanied minors seeking refuge in the United States in “Lost Children Archive,” though ultimately this time around the focus remains more squarely on her protagonists’ lives.
The continuity between the two books makes sense given that all of Luiselli’s writing is somewhat autobiographical, an issue she first raised in her 2014 debut, “Faces in the Crowd,” when the husband of that novel’s narrator interjects to ask “how much is fiction and how much fact.” In the new novel, Ella interrogates the autobiographical nature of her writing, acknowledging that she mines “slivers of [her] own life, shades of moments, pluckings from a family lexicon” for her fiction, and wondering where the line should be drawn now that her daughter has started to mistake made-up moments from “Lost Children Archive” for genuine childhood memories.
“Beginning Middle End” picks up seven years after the conclusion of “Lost Children Archive,” with Ella’s marriage having ended in divorce and she and Manuela traveling to Sicily, where her maternal grandmother grew up. They start off in Catania, on the island’s eastern coast, staying in the (temporarily) empty apartment of a man Ella has been dating, before working their way across the island. On their journey, Ella tries to “reinvent” their lives, restart her writing, and temper her concerns about the memory lapses afflicting her mother back in Mexico. She and Manuela also wrestle with the fate of an ancient tile depicting the shape-shifting Greek god Proteus that Ella’s grandmother took from a Sicilian archeological dig when she was a teen.
The daughter provided welcome comic relief from the weighty subject matter of “Lost Children Archive,” and again that character showcases Luiselli’s delightful wit. Here Manuela is a 12-year-old, coffee-drinking, speed-chess hustler whose obsession with Latin and Greek literature, especially Pliny’s “Natural History,” assures she will soon be as erudite as her mother. She compares the “fake hair” of her mother’s lover, which Ella’s carnal interest overlooked, to “black mini-golf grass.” And she calls out some of her mom’s more ponderous musings, responding to Ella’s assertion that “fiction is where memory and imagination meet” with the withering dismissal, “that’s absurd.”
In addition to describing basic narrative structure, the novel’s title applies to themes regarding time (past, present, and future), lifespan (childhood, adulthood, and old age), geography (eastern, central, and southwestern Sicily), and especially generations (daughter, mother, and grandmother). Men don’t play a major role in the novel and, with a couple of exceptions, don’t come off too well. Ella addresses her divorce’s emotional trauma in an arresting passage about the many ways men seek to intrigue, entice, abuse, and dominate women via their zippers, “the dead-end of all the dark rooms we fear, and the beginning of all the corridors, bureaucratic or metaphysical, where we will either get lost, or not get lost, but which we will return to endlessly, in search for the body we were before that day, the body before the soul of it was looted, our body the day before that night, before that night.”
Luiselli’s fiction always phases in secondary narrators, and indeed Manuela takes over the final section here, Ella having confessed that she doesn’t know who is steering the ship, “whose breath it is that animates it, our story.” Manuela is determined to provide an ending, but is preoccupied with all that historically ends by being “torn asunder.” And though she doesn’t want to talk about it with her mother, she’s deeply mourning the sundering of her family, especially the relationship with her stepbrother, who now lives in California. (Manuela creates several paths to feel closer to this absent figure, including writing him simple, heartbreaking postcards that are reproduced along with archival photos at the end of the novel.)
Prior to Manuela usurping the storyteller role, Ella candidly acknowledges the challenges of the current moment: “It’s difficult: imagining and reimagining during a time like this time. I want to write about the sense of loss, anticipated loss, but also about all the things that may be saved.” The sentiment applies to both her personal challenges and our chaotic world, but I take some not insignificant degree of comfort in the fact that an artist of Luiselli’s remarkable thoughtfulness and intellect is around to document whatever will come, especially whatever will end.
BEGINNING MIDDLE END
By Valeria Luiselli
Knopf, 368 pages, $35
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance critic.