Sidewalks

February 3, 2014
“Writing about Mexico City is a task doomed to failure,” notes Luiselli, yet that’s the just task she takes on in her essays exploring that city, as well as Venice and New York. Each essay is subdivided into bite-size observations, arranged lackadaisically under subtitles that relate more to the subject at large than the contents of their section: construction signs, for example, or cycling directions for Luiselli’s route through her neighborhood. These essays take an unhurried pace well-suited for the ambling walks and bike rides that inspired them, deepened by literary and historical asides that situate these places in a context beyond the present moment. Language holds as much significance as geography here, particularly those words that have no easy translation, such as Portuguese’s melancholic saudade or the Spanish concept of relingos—unclaimed urban space. This leads some sections to become overly enamored of their own lyricism, but the final essay brings the collection to a satisfying conclusion, returning to Venice and the San Michele graveyard in which the first essay occurs, while incorporating key details from earlier pieces. Luiselli’s writing here seems more rightly called poetry than prose, evoking all the sensory detail that implies and leaving any prosaic conclusions for after the journey’s end.

Starred review from April 1, 2014
Place, identity and the limitations of language converge in this slim collection of illuminating and incisive essays. In her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, published in America concurrently with this volume, Luiselli writes of literary recognition as a "virus," one that these simultaneous publications is sure to spread. If anything, these essays are more impressive in both their expansiveness and epigrammatic precision, as the young writer--born in Mexico City, prolific in her output and currently studying for a doctorate in comparative literature at Columbia--mediates between her scholarship and her personal experience. The collection begins and ends in a cemetery in Venice, with the author making a pilgrimage to the grave of the exiled poet in the opening "Joseph Brodsky's Room and a Half" and then returning full circle with the closing "Permanent Residence," which ends with a vision of her own tombstone, after an admission that "writing about Venice is like emptying a glass of water into the sea." In between, she writes of other places--primarily Mexico City and New York--and maps, architecture and, always, books and authors. "Going back to a book is like returning to the cities we believe to be our own, but which, in reality, we've forgotten and been forgotten by," she writes. "In a city--in a book--we vainly revisit passages, looking for nostalgias that no longer belong to us....Rereading is not like remembering. It's more like rewriting ourselves." Whatever she writes about, ultimately, she's writing about language, exploring the possibilities of words as well as recognizing their limits: "Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything." A collection that can't be categorized as memoir or travel writing or literary criticism but cohesively combines such elements and more.

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May 1, 2014
Luiselli's debut book of essays, published in conjunction with her first novel, Faces in the Crowd (2014), brings the captivating, meditative work of Mexican-born Luiselli stateside. In these short, linked essays, Luiselli explores themes of motion, travel, transition, and reflection. Whether wandering in a Venetian graveyard in search of Joseph Brodsky's resting place or navigating neighborhoods and contemplating the state of longing described by the Portuguese term saudade, erudite Luiselli writes with a cosmopolitan appreciation for cityscapes. She nods to such literary figures as Swiss writer Robert Walser, French poet Charles Baudelaire, and German critic Walter Benjamin, joining the long tradition of writerly saunters, strolls, and flneries. Luiselli's prose moves quickly, and the resulting essays challenge readers to rethink notions of space and place. In Relingos, Luiselli considers the cartography of empty space and addresses the imaginary architecture of Roland Barthes without sounding unpleasantly academic or didactic. By combining the perceptive intelligence of H'l'ne Cixous with the free-form sentences of W. G. Sebald, these essays establish Luiselli as one of her generation's finest nonfiction writers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)