Beginning Middle End - Hardcover

Luiselli, Valeria

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798217208319

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How it Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure.

Valeria Luiselli's novel opens the morning a mother and her teenage daughter arrive in Sicily, during a summer of rapidly-changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed near the ancient ruins where the narrator’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. How do you begin again, the mother wonders, pondering her family line, and what if the new beginning you're imagining is actually the end?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives together—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making-up—her deeply intelligent, inquisitive daughter begins to take the reins of the story. She becomes increasingly curious about her great-grandmother’s past as a digger in archaeological sites and ancient tombs, and urges her mother to leave their enclosed day-to-day in search for answers about their family’s past and future. 

Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness. In their drive through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, but also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. As their trip progresses, it becomes a journey to origins—not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also further back to a mythical and geological past. With her own mother showing signs of dementia, the narrator confronts the primary questions of life: Where is home? Where do we dwell and seek safety? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?

Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in New York City.

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MOTHER

What are you most afraid of in old age, Ma?

GRANDMOTHER

Perder la mente.

DAUGHTER

Is this for a novel, Mama?

MOTHER

I’m not sure.

DAUGHTER

Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?

GRANDMOTHER

Perder claridad.


I

CONTENTS
In the beginning was a mother and a daughter. Later, somewhere closer to the middle, there were other mothers and daughters, there were men, there were other people in general. But for now, it is only she and I, and a ray of sunlight enters the bedroom through a sliver between the curtains, and the ray crosses the thick smoky air and touches the bed, staggers a line across the wrinkles of the sheet from her toes, up her legs, stomach, chest, and neck, then disperses into her face, and she is sleeping, and I put my hand on her forehead and gently wake her up.

THE WORLD
I had been looking for something like a beginning. A strange thing, perhaps, to expect from time or from life: the chance to begin, or to begin again. All I had to do, or so I thought, was to answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives? It was going to be only she and I for now.

FINITUDE
I was eager to be elsewhere, far from my old spaces, far from my present moment. I had finished writing a difficult book, finished a project recording soundscapes and oral histories in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and had then passed through a slow, entangled divorce. The constellation—finishing, finishing, finishing—had left me feeling like an astronaut: in circumflotation, enclosed but never quite anywhere.

The weeks and months had passed, the unceasing rotation of the calendar, but I found myself as if always in the same spot. For some time after those endings, I had been stumbling from one false beginning to the next. I hadn’t been able to start writing anything other than scattered notes, I hadn’t been able to start anything that felt like a real relationship, I hadn’t been able to find that feeling—which many reported—of life starting anew after a big ending.

UNITY
Now, almost a year later, the book was about to come out in translation in several languages in Europe, and I had accepted all the invitations sent to my agency. I had, in fact, earnestly asked my agent to look for more, for anything: readings, conferences, workshops, book clubs. A friend of mine had noted:

You’re like those people who will eat everything on an airplane just because it’s free.

I took my daughter out of school a little before the end of the year, and registered her for homeschooling for the rest of the seventh-grade cycle. I had found perfect tenants from April to September: a couple of Canadian medievalists. They’d take care of our plants, they would pay on time, they wouldn’t steal my books.

I didn’t reply anything to that friend, but for days in my head I kept telling him:

Nothing is free on airplanes anymore.

SHAPE
Two suitcases: one gray, one green. We left the city at the beginning of spring. The original plan was: we would move and move again, light suitcases, loose schedules, until things fell back into place. April and May, we moved every two or three days, hotels mostly, small and large towns and cities, book readings and lectures and symposiums. In Switzerland and Austria, all the readers that came to my events were either septuagenarians or octogenarians, which was both very moving and somewhat concerning. There were brief stays in Lyon, Warsaw, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin. I had an IUD extraction in Munich. She lost a molar inside a bowl of soup in a café in Prague.

MOTION
I observed her closely, perhaps too closely now that it was only she and I, her behavior a strange mirror of my capacity or incapacity to raise her well on my own. Everywhere we went, she obsessively bought old postcards, scribbled things on them, but then refused to send them to anyone. Everywhere we went, all she wanted to do was read on her own or play chess with me.

In Berlin, I tried to teach her how to ride a bicycle: impossible, she pedaled always backward. I tried not to think about it metaphorically. In a small coastal town near Amsterdam, we stood a long time on the gray shore of a long beach and watched schoolchildren swim with their shoes on. As the swell approached the shoreline, the children would swim against the current, their sneakers visible above the surface, moving in short, quick, shallow kicks. It was a strange, disquieting sight, after which my daughter refused to get into the water.

A few days later, in Barcelona, she cried inconsolably after we saw a woman—maybe young, maybe old, possibly homeless—mumbling at a city wall. We had walked past her, and the woman had opened her rucksack and poured its contents onto the sidewalk: a spill of old books. She held one of them up, read some words we didn’t understand, then looked at us, pointed a finger, smiled a wide smile, and announced:

Omnes fines mundi!

REASONS FOR ITS NAME
What is it—to start again? Where is it—the beginning? Perhaps things never fall into place entirely, but when June came and I had finished my last work commitments and cashed the checks I was able to cash, and we took a plane that landed one evening in Catania Airport, I had a feeling for the first time in months that we had finally arrived somewhere. We would finally have a chance to settle down in one place for some time.

My maternal grandmother was originally from a small town near Catania. And though she died when I was still young, and I had never come to the island until now, as soon as we stepped off the airplane I felt a distinct sense of home—past or future, I’m not sure. We climbed down the metal stairs onto the tarmac, looked up at the star-clustered sky, and she said:

Look, Ma, a sky-yawning.

A what?

A sky-yawning.

What do you mean?

Nothing, Ma, never mind.

Perhaps it wasn’t a sense of home, but something like an echo of someone else’s belonging: borrowed memories, rumors passed down. I read somewhere that the word “echo” comes from the Greek “oikos,” which means “house”—and if that is true, maybe “echo” and “belonging” are more closely related than one might think.

THE ELEMENTS
It was, of course, an impossible plan—moving until something finally fell into place—because usually nothing just falls into place. A liberating idea, an impossible plan. Eventually, I thought, I’d have a clearer plan. Eventually, though, we would have to move for very different reasons than the ones which initially sprung us outward, but that came later, and we didn’t know anything about that then.


II

GOD
In the taxi from the airport to the apartment, the man on the radio says Etna spewed a plume of ash and gas earlier today, but no damages are reported. He also says there will be a lunar eclipse before dawn, and that the Levante will soon be entering from the east. My daughter asks me:

What is Etna, Ma?

A volcano.

Is it dangerous?

Not at all, darling.

And what’s the Levante?

That I don’t know.

But the taxi driver says he does know. There are two lineages of taxi drivers, the ones who say they don’t know anything, and the ones who know all the things. He tells us the Levante is a good wind, one of the many winds that sweep over this island. So many winds populate the skies here with their furious blasts and roaring gales, he says, that the Greeks thought that it was in one of the caves off this coast that the god...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217208319
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar