Beginning Middle End

Valeria Luiselli

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Literary Fiction

Beginning Middle End is a story that follows a mother and her daughter on a road trip through Sicily. They go to places where they share lots of family history, memories, storytelling, and their own shifting relationship. As the two travel together, the novel moves through a wide range of ideas and observations, allowing the present journey to intersect with the past and with larger questions about identity, migration, motherhood, and the stories we construct about ourselves and others.

Having also read Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, I couldn't help noticing how familiar the central setup felt. Both novels place a family on a road trip and use that journey as a framework for exploring much larger ideas. I gave Lost Children Archive three stars as well, and I found myself arriving at a remarkably similar reaction here. There is plenty to admire in Luiselli's approach, but the journey itself never became compelling enough for me to feel fully invested in where it was going.

That said, the problem was certainly not the writing. Luiselli's prose is beautiful, and I appreciated many of the subjects the novel engages with. As someone who loves literary fiction, I was quite happy to follow its reflections and digressions, at least in principle, and there is no shortage of interesting material beneath the surface. The novel is thoughtful and often intelligent, but I occasionally felt that my admiration for what it was doing was greater than my enjoyment of actually reading it.

Ultimately, the pacing was simply too slow for me. The story takes its time—and then takes a little more of it—and although that deliberate rhythm may work for readers who are completely absorbed by Luiselli's voice, I found myself waiting for the journey to gain a stronger sense of momentum. There is a great deal here that I genuinely liked, particularly the prose and the ideas, but the novel never quite came together in a way that made me want to rate it higher. A thoughtful and beautifully written book, then, but one that, for me, remained more admirable than engaging.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC of this book.

Key Themes

• Motherhood
• Family History
• Identity
• Road Trip
• Migration
• Mythology