Valeria Luiselli's "Beginning Middle End" Explores Narrative Structure

Valeria Luiselli's fourth novel, "Beginning Middle End," grapples with the inherent difficulty of imposing a linear narrative structure—beginning, middle, and end—onto the complexities of lived experience. This thematic exploration is directly inspired by Grace Paley's short story "A Conversation With My Father," where the narrator is challenged by her father to write a simple, traditional story. Luiselli's novel mirrors this by having the narrator's own 12-year-old daughter pose a similar request: "Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?" This quest for narrative coherence is a recurring concern for Luiselli, who previously addressed the fragmented nature of migrant children's stories in her 2017 book-length essay, "Tell Me How It Ends," noting that their experiences "has no beginning, no middle and no end." "Beginning Middle End" chronicles the narrator's attempts to organize her life and her daughter's experiences into a discernible story, a task that would likely leave the father from Paley's story unimpressed.

The novel follows the narrator, a Mexican expatriate living in the United States, as she embarks on a European book tour with her daughter following a "slow, entangled" divorce. The journey itself becomes a series of distinct events that the narrator attempts to weave into a cohesive narrative. During their travels, the daughter loses a tooth in Prague, and the pair witness children learning to swim with their shoes on near Amsterdam, a scene interpreted as a response to potential flooding. The narrator also undergoes a medical procedure, having a coil removed in Munich. These individual moments, while concrete, resist easy integration into a traditional plot arc. The narrative further develops when the mother and daughter travel to Catania, Sicily, during the summer. This segment of the journey is particularly significant as the narrator's grandmother grew up in the vicinity. They reside in the apartment of a pianist with whom the narrator had a "brief and feverish encounter" the previous year, adding a layer of personal history and unresolved connection to their Sicilian stay. The novel, therefore, uses these specific locations and events—Munich, Prague, Amsterdam, Catania—and personal milestones—coil removal, tooth loss, parental divorce, past romantic encounters—as the raw material for its examination of narrative construction.