“Beginning Middle End,” a Valeria Luiselli novel that doesn’t end
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“Beginning Middle End” is told in vignettes through an inventory of astronomy terms. After completing a book tour and going through a divorce, the main narrator, an unnamed woman, and her nameless daughter travel to Sicily and ask themselves one question: How do you start again?
For them, Sicily becomes a border between the past and the present as well as between memory and imagination. It is a place where the women can think about home, migration and their ancestors. Their journey also becomes a quest to return an ancient Proteus mosaic artifact that the mother’s grandmother, Nanna, took from an archaeological dig when she was a young woman in Sicily. The mosaic has remained within the family and eventually makes its way to the mother and daughter. While the mother sees it as a family heirloom, the daughter sees it as a stolen item that should be returned.
The daughter becomes determined to return the mosaic, but the mother does not immediately share her urgency. For the daughter, returning it could help restore something that was disrupted when her great-grandmother took it from the archaeological site. Her ideas about the mosaic are also connected to what she is learning about stones, history and the natural world. Meanwhile, the mother is dealing with her own mother’s memory loss. The grandmother is experiencing dementia, and her granddaughter has begun writing letters to her, creating another connection between the youngest and oldest generations of the family.
Migration plays a clear role in this novel and connects these women. As the mother and daughter explore Sicily and learn to adapt to their new lives, they interact with nature and locals alike. As part of the emerging expanded literature genre, the book adds QR codes that contain real, immersive recordings from Sicily of rumbling volcanoes and fishermen singing, transporting the reader right there with the characters as they travel the land. These shared experiences along with their reflections on the past, help shape the two’s initially rocky relationship over time into something stronger.
Greek literature and mythology are also part of this world. Proteus, the shape-shifting Greek god, becomes central to the story through the mosaic the daughter wants to return. His ability to change form mirrors the novel’s shifting relationship with memory, identity and storytelling. The characters also turn to ancient texts, particularly the writings of Pliny the Elder, as they try to understand how the natural world, history and reality intersect.
The title serves multiple purposes for the novel as well. While it suggests a traditional structure for a story, Valeria Luiselli continuously questions whether a beginning, middle and end can really define one person’s entire life. The three words also reflect the different stages of life represented by the daughter, mother and grandmother. As the women age, the possibility of losing their memories becomes a fear for each of them. The grandmother is already losing her memories. The mother is afraid of losing her own mother’s stories. The daughter is beginning to understand how easily memories can be created, changed or forgotten.
Throughout their journey, the mother and daughter wonder what could have possibly happened to Nanna’s mind when she took the mosaic from an archaeological site years before she immigrated to Mexico. The mother constantly plays with these imaginary memories, creating so many that by the time the daughter takes over narrating the story, it’s unclear what is truth or fiction. How distorted is the mother’s story? How reliable is she? The daughter must question her own memories now since many are derived from her mother’s stories, and once she becomes the narrator, the daughter begins to create her own version of what happened.
The mother reflects on this uncertainty of memory while thinking about her own mother and daughter. “…I think [the story I’m writing] is fiction, but I am afraid it may become non-fiction. I am afraid of both the loss of memory in my mother and the fabrication of memories in my daughter,” she writes to herself on page 103. “I don’t quite understand the relationship between fiction and memory, and I sense that if in the meantime I write about oceans, maybe geology and rocks, mosaics, some fish, time passing and reversing, I may eventually start to understand this new feeling that time in the world has changed, this new feeling that we are getting closer and closer to the end of something, to some complete distortion and erasure of all memories.”
(photo by Clayton Cubitt)
The mother also often reflects on the passing of time and what being in the middle means. She cannot go back and change what has happened in her marriage or life and grieves watching her mother lose what she treasures most: her mind and stories.
The daughter, even as she questions whether any record can ever be completely true, finds another way to hold on to those stories by sending letters and photographs of their travels to her grandmother. By the end of the story, the daughter sees herself as the carrier of her family’s stories and decides to tell them in her own way.
The final pages showcase postcards and Polaroids where Luiselli and her own daughter appear, which further complicates the boundary between the fictional story and the author’s life. The photographs leave the reader with another question: how real is this novel?
Real or not, what matters to these characters is the story they are telling. For them, the Sicilian volcano still roars, and the sounds of fishermen singing and waves crashing still echo in the background of their travels. The novel does not offer a simple answer about what is real and what is imagined. Instead, it allows both possibilities to exist together.
This novel might remind the reader of Luiselli’s other books. Perhaps “Faces in the Crowd” feels similar because of its fragmentation and multiple narrators. “Lost Children Archive” could also feel familiar because it follows a mother and daughter traveling together and explores the relationship between memory, migration and storytelling. The connection between the two novels is especially noticeable in the way Luiselli uses a mother-daughter relationship to question how stories are remembered and passed down.
Although she utilizes similar themes, this novel finds a new way to lay down layer after layer of meaning, folding time and planting memories where they are hard to discern yet fascinating to read. “Beginning Middle End” invites you to leave behind your notions of plot and fiction and dive into a story of mosaics and family, threading together one fabricated memory at a time.
— Written by Ofelia Montelongo
— Copy edited by Valerie Izquierdo
Ofelia Montelongo is a bilingual writer from Mexico with an MBA in strategic leadership, an M.A. in Latin American literature and an MFA in Creative Writing in nonfiction and poetry. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Latino Book Review, Los Acentos Review and elsewhere, and she was the editor of the “Latine Monsters” issue at Barrelhouse. A Macondista and a PEN America Emerging Voices fellow, Montelongo currently teaches as a writer in residence for PEN/Faulkner. She is also a Tin House, VONA and Key West Seminar alumna. She is Associate Editor at the Bilingual Press | Editorial Bilingüe at Arizona State University.
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