forgettable faces in the crowd
“Do octopuses have little mobydicks?
I’m working.
And shrimps? And sea sponges?
The boy’s father thinks for a moment and then:
Shrimps are little-dicks”
As much as the father was just a thorny skeptic for most of the book, that quote made me stop and laugh.
I had a hard time getting into this book, and it was definitely one of my least favorites so far. There were bits I liked, just because of the writing style, (I liked how it was messy, fragmented, and read like a draft) but all in all, it was a bit too mundane and droll, really lacking some action to tie it all together. Also, the timeline jumps took getting used to, but I think it’s supposed to be confusing, chasing a version of her that exists only in memory now. It kind of connected to Book of Chameleons for me, in the way it explores the theme of identity. You are who you are shaped into, by experience, stories, memories. And who we are changes so much throughout our lives. Other than that, I thought this was a very calm, quiet read.
In the present day, our narrator seems to be a woman who wasn’t allowed to fully chase her dreams and is now stuck with, as she repeats many times, “no air”, in a suffocatingly small life where she rarely even leaves the kitchen and bedrooms of her home. I preferred the flashbacks where it’s very sweetly New York new city in your messy messy 20’s. The lecture put it well as, “she goes to bars and parties, occasionally picks up discarded pieces of furniture, and indulges in minor kleptomania at her office or at other people’s houses”. I kind of like that.
With this being a romance studies class and all the books we’ve read being translated from a Romance language to English, I have been seeing our last reads have themes of translation, transformation, and identity at their cores. Faces in the Crowd really embodies this, the whole novel is essentially an act of transformation, where the narrator takes Owen’s real life and rewrites it, translates it into something new, and in doing so loses track of where he ends and she begins. Even within the story, her fake translations of Owen’s poems aren’t really forgeries so much as transformations, she makes him into something he wasn’t, and somehow that version of him becomes more real and more celebrated than the original ever was (connecting back to Book of Chameleons again). Identity in this book feels like it works the same way, always something being drafted and redrafted, never finished.
DQ: Do we think when we hear Owen’s perspective at the end of his life, it is truly coming from him? Or is it a product of her obsession with him that she comes up with it herself and writes it down.
I believe that either yes, it is Owen's real perspective at the end of the book, but it means that the original narrator isn't real, and she is the made-up one created by Owen. Or that it is not truly coming from him, and it is a part of her obsession with him. And it could be read both ways, depending on the person reading.
I surprisingly found the writing style quite captivating, by the end I started to like it. It really forces you to concentrate on the different narratives and carefully read to understand at least most of it, of course there are things left for interpretation that aren’t clarified but overall I enjoyed the reading experience, it’s definitely different than any other book I’ve read. On the other hand, for Owen’s story I like to think of him as a ghost, almost that her obsession led her to become one with Owen, allowing her to present his side of the story from a person that has studied him enough to truly get the way his mind operates. At the end of the day she matched their lives and timelines to almost overlap, while managing to keep the distance and division between characters. So in a way it is his story, told by the ghost of him that haunts her and her writing.