Status Updates From Faces in the Crowd

estoy llorando tengo mommy issues no me hagas esto valeria

"Now I write at night, when the two children are asleep and it’s acceptable to smoke, drink, and let drafts in. Before, I used to write all the time, at any hour, because my body belonged to me. My legs were long, strong, and slim. It was right to offer them: to whomever, to writing."

Vuelve a agarrar vuelo. Las últimas páginas son preciosas. La fundición de las narrativas en una sola, intercalándose, las distinciones cada vez menores, pero incidiendo ya una en la otra; ya no es un relato que escribe a otro, ambos se escriben a sí mismos, a sí y al otro.
Las últimas dos o tres páginas son el punto culmine de esta reciprocidad.
Dos imágenes que en verdad son una.

Comienza a aburrirme un poco.
Hasta ahora el libro va bien: las líneas narrativas que surgen y desaparecen hacen la lectura más interesante. El instante en que la novela se vuelve dos es un buen punto de inflexión; el juego entre lo que se dice y no, engancha. Creo que después de que se revela la verdad sobre las presuntas traducciones de Zukofsky la novela tiene una serie de fragmentos muy buenos, y luego decae.

"De joven, era tal mi desprecio por la vida que me iba provocando muertes cada vez más opulentas. Lo jodido es que ahora, que preferiría estar vivo nomás, me he provocado una muerte lenta, humillante y aburrida. Mis muertes en Manhattan eran rápidas y venían de afuera: un subway me partía los huesos del cráneo; un negro me enterraba un cuchillo a la salida de un bar; me estallaba el apéndice a medianoche..."

"En Las mil y una noches la narradora hilvana una serie de relatos para posponer el día de su muerte. Tal vez un mecanismo semejante pero inverso le sirva a esta historia, a esta muerte. La narradora descubre que mientras hilvana un relato, el tejido de su realidad inmediata se desgasta y quiebra. La fibra de ficción empieza a modificar la realidad y no viceversa (...) Ninguna de las dos cosas es sacrificable."

Me recuerda mucho a Zambra, concretamente a "Formas de volver a casa": la estructura fragmentaria, la presunta autoficción, eso pequeños juegos y comentarios metaliterarios, la escritura sugerida desde un "presente" que intercala con recuerdos y anécdotas dirigidas a un punto indeterminado.
Lo curioso es que ambas novelas salieron el mismo año.
Será azar o sólo una influencia en común que desconozco.

I'm enjoying following the different stories. confusing in an interesting way

Almost there.....and it is finally starting to make sense. Or I've descended into Lusielli's craziness.

Cohesion is slowly coming to this book. I still rather dislike it but it's nice to final feel some semblance of order.

This book is truly over my head. I don't know what the hell is going on, this main protagonist is wretched and damnable. I just got through a momentarily funny scene where her ex husband oddly witnessed his own poetic and public emasculation.

I don't get it and am eager to be done.

This woman is depressing.

"Genç olmakla yaşlı olmak arasındaki fark, ölümü ne kadar ciddiye aldığımızla alakalıymış gibi geliyor bana.'

p72 - linear vs boomerang

pos va bien, ojalá corte con el marido enfadoso

This book has a very morose tone. My sister thinks you may need to understand Spanish to get it....I dunno. I don't get this woman.... and she seems lost herself.

Whoops forgot to update yesterday

Qué bestia que es Luiselli

There are two types of people: those who just live and those who design their lives

Ezra pound : faces in the crowd to petals on a dark bough

“But I burn much brighter than I write.”

“New York is a theory of a city built on the foundation of time alone. Manhattan is an hour, or a century, with the woodwork of the subways boring through it, eating it away, second by second.”

“Then you are a bad novelist, but you are a novelist.
Given.
If you dedicate yourself to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.
I think it’s a matter of freezing time without stopping the movement of things, a bit like when you’re on a train, looking out of the window.
It’s also not unusual that if you’re an novelist, you’re an idiot.”

“What happens is that people die many times in a single life my dear Mr. Owen.
How come, Mr. Collyer?
People die, irresponsibly leave a ghost of themselves hanging around, and then they, the original and the ghost, go on living, each in his own right.
How can you tell who’s whose ghost?”

“That’s not important.
Huh?
Damnit, Mr. Owen. Aren’t you the one who can remember the future?”

“However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs of a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.”

“I told him that I’d turned into a ghost; or maybe that I was the only living girl in a city of ghosts; that, in any case, I didn’t like dying all the time.”

“She was like a lobster; and I, like the filth that accumulated on the seabed.”

“At the same time, I harboured the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty that I would one day finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I’d been elaborating for years.“

“I think when I was young I was weighed down by a constant sense of social inadequacy—I was never the most popular nor the most eloquent at a table; never the best read nor the best writer; not the most successful nor the most talented; definitely not the most handsome nor the one who had the most luck with women.”

“All novels lack something or someone. In this novel, there’s no one. No one except a ghost I used to see sometimes in the subway.”

“Not a fragmented novel. A horizontal novel, narrated vertically.”