Valeria Luiselli and Maria Horvei
Several stories and temporal levels meet in Valeria Luiselli’s novel Faces in the Crowd: A writer and mother of two in Mexico City is writing about the time she spent as a young adult in New York City. She lets her husband read what she writes, but he objects to the way in which she describes her own past.
While in New York, she was obsessed with the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, a man who lived and worked in 1920s New York, on the fringes of the modernist Harlem Renaissance movement. Fragments of Owen’s life is put into writing; he is broke and rides the subway, and connections are drawn between his and her life, for who is the young woman that Gilberto Owen frequently seems to see through the train window?
Valeria Luiselli has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a luminous name in contemporary Mexican literature, and appeared on the Nation Book Foundation’s list of “5 under 35”. Earlier, Luiselli received considerable attention for her powerful essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, about Latin American child migrants’ fate in and on their way to the US.
Her latest novel in English is The Story of My Teeth, about a man who auctions off teeth which allegedly belonged to people such as Virginia Woolf and Plato.
Her debut novel, Faces in the Crowd, has seen critics compare Luiselli to writers such as Ali Smith and Zadie Smith.
Meet Luiselli in conversation with editor of Vinduet, Maria Horvei.
Litteraturhuset Wergeland https://litteraturhuset.ticketco.events/no/nb/e/ansikt_i_et_togvindu_valeria_luiselli_og_helge_jordheim2808 sesongåpning English