Faces In The Crowd by Valeria Luiselli with Vincola Atacalco 'Carabe de Casablanca’

For some time now I’ve been looking back. Re-reading novels in order to feel a little less lost. The impulse being: if I could see who I was in that life, when I first read it, I could find myself again in this place. In fact, so much so that lately I feel almost incapable of reading a new thing, though I have a sneaking suspicion that what I’m looking for lives somewhere in a future tense too. As a novel, Valeria Luiselli’s Faces In The Crowd exists, almost entirely, in this “inconjugatable tense” between—or containing—this and that life, which means it exists in a tense more dedicated to “folding time” than keeping things vertical. It’s a novel I felt I’d read numerous times, though, by my own notes, it’s possible I’ve actually only read once, and so it would be more accurate to say: it’s a novel I’ve been drawn to—folded into—forward and backward, many, many times. In this life I spend a lot of time with a partner who thinks I describe things as porous that can not, or should not,