Coffee House Press

120 pp, $15.95

Review by Jacob Spears

In the essay “Joseph Brodsky’s Room and a Half,” Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli searches out the Russian-American poet’s grave on the island of San Michele in Venice. As she gets lost among the tombstones of other famous artists and writers, she meditates on the futileness of seeking out the burial sites of authors whose work she reveres and the gap that exists between a work and its creator. Her goal of communing with the dead is stymied by an elderly lady who scavenges the graves of people like Brodsky, collecting anything of value some admirer might have left behind. Luiselli feels the fleetingness of her efforts to find the literary in the world, while the elderly woman lets out a cackle, scratches her legs, and is on her way.

Born in Mexico City, Luiselli takes from her experiences as a resident and traveler of cosmopolitan cities to reflect on the author’s place in the twenty-first century metropolis. Like Faces in the Crowd, a novella released simultaneously in the United States, Sidewalks is a collection of essays that imagines a fluid relationship between writers, readers, and the world. If literature does engender readers who wish the world appeared more like art, it also has a history of condemning those who believe the demands of art can be fulfilled by life. In the European literature that has so clearly colored Luiselli’s life as a reader, the most that can be hoped for is to copy what’s already been produced like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet. Which is maybe why her attempt to have some graveyard connection with a dead author feels so futile. Continue reading →