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’s Man of the Crowd and Baudelaire’s 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’s 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, Bolaño, 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’s 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’s 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.
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”We 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’s 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.”