Faces In the Crowd : A Confusion?

 Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli is an interesting story! It follows a woman writing a book and she has two children, a boy and a baby girl. At first, I was confused when all these characters did not have names. It made me wonder if the main character was Valeria Luiselli and it follows her train of thought and life as she writes the book. The quote, “It all began in another city and another life. (...) I was young, had strong, thin legs.” This points to how the story was set in the past and she was reminiscing her life. This element of time is evident in the story. There is an evident contrast with her curent life in Mexico City, where she rarely leaves her house. This shows how that there is a stark difference between her life now and then and how that has affected their life. “We like to thin (...) there’s a ghost living with us and watching us” indicates how with her children and family, she often does not have the time and energy to focus on her writing. The story also looks at how she looks up to Gilberto Owen, a minor Mexican poet and diplomat of the first half od the 20th century who lived in New York in the late 1920s. She becomes very obsessed with him until she starts going to places he has been before such as where he used to live. Honestly, I think it was weird that she would imagine seeing him on the subway. However, as a writer myself, sometimes when I am in writing from a perspective of a character that is totally different from me, I would try to make myself see the world from my character’s point of view. Perhaps she did because she was trying to write the novel from his narration. However, I still found this odd because why didn’t she just create her own character rather than from his perspective? Maybe it was supposed to be her way of plunging into the genre of historical fiction? I like the quote that she ponders about “that the difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint: the living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some sort of center” (23). I thought that was interesting because everyone has different viewpoints in life. However, the dead and alive aspect made me think about the Shrouded Woman. My question : Why do you think all the characters were unnamed?

Comments

  1. Meta - Sol March 30, 2026 at 12:00 AM

    “I like the quote that she ponders about “that the difference between being alive and being dead is just a matter of viewpoint: the living look from the center outward, the dead from the periphery to some sort of center” (23). I thought that was interesting because everyone has different viewpoints in life.”
    Totally, that quote shows that the mesh between all the perspectives does not take life or death as a significant difference.
    See you tomorrow!
    Julián.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jon Beasley-MurrayMarch 30, 2026 at 12:17 AM

    Hasfariza, you describe Gilberto Owen as "a minor Mexican poet and diplomat of the first half od the 20th century who lived in New York in the late 1920s."

    I describe him as "a minor Mexican poet and diplomat of the first half of the twentieth century, who
    briefly lived in New York in the late 1920s."

    You should *not* have such word-for-word repetition in your blog posts (or anywhere else). You can quote the lecture, indicating your source (and using quotation marks where relevant).

    You need to fix this. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

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