This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking<\/p>\n
In Grace Paley\u2019s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. \u201cI would like you to write a simple story just once more,\u201d her father says, \u201cthe kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov \u2026 Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next.\u201d Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story. Valeria Luiselli\u2019s fourth novel is\u00a0propelled by a similar request, the daughter of\u00a0the Luiselli-like narrator asking: \u201cWill you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?\u201d It\u2019s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story \u201cis that it has no beginning, no middle and no end\u201d.<\/p>\n
Beginning Middle End charts the narrator\u2019s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley\u2019s story would be similarly unimpressed. After a \u201cslow, entangled\u201d divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods. When summer comes, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator\u2019s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who\u2019s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a \u201cbrief and feverish encounter\u201d the previous year.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/a13c696d46ae99181653977a1a286e53dac1c092\/0_1176_3428_2743\/master\/3428.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bcd78ce82f25a9c03b53a93eeac6b0c8\" "\\"Beginning")
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"