BEGINNING MIDDLE END Brilliantly Blurs the Lines Between Fiction and NonFiction

Valerie Luiselli is a Mexican-American author. She has received numerous literary accolades including the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Dublin Literary Award and two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Her most recent novel, Luiselli delights and beguiles the reader with her inventive writing that mashes fiction and non-written to create a clever tale of mother-daughter-granddaughter relationships which weaves three generations. This meshing of forms creates a unique, new genre that contorts facts and fiction. Luiselli's protagonist is an established author on a book tour in Sicily with her teenage daughter. The narrator's clever daughter confronts her mother as to whether she is writing auto-fiction. In other words, is mom writing about them in her book she's working on. The narrator denies this but her daughter  reads aloud to her mom a passage that "...reproduced an entire monologue from the character of a girl in my novel, a little girl who in the novel is the daughter of the narrator."  The plot unhurriedly meanders as it traipse along on the mother/daughter road trip.  It's not the plot that drives this inventive work but rather the narrator's dissecting of what she is presently experiencing and then recording. The narrator explains her writing as "A novel about a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her mother traveling along the edge of somewhere, toward some other time frame. A novel in the middle, the middle of a novel. Or is it not a novel, but an essay? Perhaps the middle does not fit into the tighter architecture of a novel, the worst of plot."  The story commences in an apartment in Sicily on loaned from an abusive boyfriend.  When he returns, they flee from his brutal behavior. Their car trip on the island takes on ominous threats from fires and volcanic eruptions occurring nearby.  Throughout there is a haunting aura of deja vu, approaching doom and menacing mishaps taking place. Just prior to the mother and her daughter going abroad, the mom split from her husband, separating the daughter from a step-father and step-brother whom she had grown attached. While the mother is concerned for her daughter's feelings neither she is not forthcoming with any explanations. Neither is the daughter with her feelings regarding the familial split. Grandma's senility also poses dilemmas for her daughter and granddaughter which adds a comical lilt. The journey leads them to the home of the grandma's friend. Shortly after arriving, they need to escape quickly by boat as fires are now nearby. The ending our narrator/writer has been seeking to resolve concludes with a surprisingly delightful montage of photos the mother/daughter took on their travels. This mystical ending left me wanting to reread this captivating and deceptively ingenious story from the beginning, again. I recommend BEGINNING MIDDLE END for its magical flair and for revealing what may actually be there in the end.