Book - BookDetective

Name: Faces in the Crowd

Author: Valeria Luiselli
Year: 2011
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Genres/categories:
Fiction, Contemporary
Culture: Latin-American

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ISBNs:
9781566893541
9781847085061
1566893542
1847085067

In the heart of Mexico City, a woman, trapped in a house and a marriage she can neither fully inhabit nor abandon, thinks about her past. She has decided to write a novel about her days at a publishing house in New York; about the strangers who became lovers and the poets and ghosts who once lived in her neighbourhood. In particular, one of the obsessions of her youth - Gilberto Owen - an obscure Mexican poet of the 1920s, a marginal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a busker on Manhattan's subway platforms, a friend and an enemy of Federico Garca Lorca.

As she writes, Gilberto Owen comes to life on the page; a solitary, faceless man living on the edges of Harlem's writing and drinking circles at the beginning of the Great Depression, haunted by the ghostly image of a woman travelling on the New York subway. Mutually distorting mirrors, their two lives connect across the decades between them; forming a single elegy of love and loss.