Beginning Middle End

by Valeria Luiselli

From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

"A beautiful, maybe perfect, novel.” —Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? 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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Italy, Contemporary, Travel, Novels, Audiobook

368 pages, Hardcover

First published June 11, 2026

About the author

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. Her novels and essays have been translated into many languages and her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s. Some of her recent projects include a ballet libretto for the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, performed by the New York City Ballet in Lincoln Center in 2010; a pedestrian sound installation for the Serpentine Gallery in London; and a novella in installments for workers in a juice factory in Mexico. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[emma]

i love books about mothers and daughters

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)

[Laubythesea]

 “Principio, medio y fin”, uno de mis libros favoritos de este 2026. No me lo saco de la cabeza.
 
Una novela muy particular, lo notarás nada más empezar, con una narradora muy parecida a la autora que plantea un juego constante donde no ficción y ficción se dan la mano. Realidad y ficción, memoria y creación se cruzan creando algo que es imposible no pensar que está ocurriendo mientras lo lees.
 
Una madre y una hija emprenden un viaje, una suerte de huida de la vida anterior, mientras intentan descifrar cómo se empieza de nuevo. Un final es también un principio para ellas, y un medio dentro de una vida. Así, llegarán a Sicilia, que fue el hogar de la abuela de la narradora antes de emigrar.  Conoceremos a cuatro generaciones de mujeres de esa familia, mientras memoria, historia y leyenda se entrelazan en un legado que se transmite de boca a boca.
 
Un libro fragmentario pero fácil de seguir. Cada capítulo, responde a una idea, un concepto, una anécdota… Cada escena tiene principio, medio y fin, pero es también parte de otras, todo se encadena. Y es precisamente esa estructura que se repite la que plantea como los inicios, medios y finales son una construcción y que realmente es difícil (sino imposible) establecerlos.
 
Hay una gran belleza en la narrativa, muy evocadora. La autora es una preciosista de las palabras, se nota que ama el lenguaje y que lo utiliza no solo para contarnos cosas en un plano superficial, sino que es una herramienta más para crear capas de significado en la historia.
 
Dentro de los temas que se abordan, me quedo con el que creo que es uno de los pilares del libro, la memoria (su importancia, fragilidad y posible artificialidad). Además, la autora relaciona de forma bellísima memoria con arqueología a través de la historia de la Nanna y su mosaico de Proteo (ya veréis).
 
La elección de Sicilia como escenario es perfecta, llena de simbología. Un lugar donde se encuentran las raíces de las protagonistas, pero desconocido para ellas. Una isla que funciona como umbral y además conecta con esa idea de lugares con mucha magia en la mitología clásica que está tan presente en la novela.
 
Un libro redondo, donde nada pasa por casualidad. Una historia que no quieres que te cuenten, tienes que leerla.

[Antonio Luis]

Lectura entrañable e inteligente, consigue convertir numerosas reflexiones en una estructura narrativa amena, entre lo ensayístico y lo afectivo, con retazos de memoria, auto ficción y relato íntimo, para exponer una forma de pensar el mundo.

Me ha gustado mucho su voz propia, la textura cálida de su tono, sobre todo la construcción existencial y cultural a partir del viaje de una madre con su hija, pero no la he sentido sostenida, la idea estructural pesa más que la emoción interior, a veces la autora parece estar observando su propia sensibilidad desde la protagonista, mostrándose irónica y elegante.

La autoficción muy visible me rompe la inmersión. Algunos pasajes se ven construidos, forzados, colocados..., se nota el artificio. La propia "protagonista" reconoce no saber cómo escribir el libro, y yo a veces pensaba que nadie la obliga... En muchas ocasiones se vuelve autoconsciente en exceso.

Lo mejor en mi opinión han sido las relecturas de los clásicos, su reinterpretación con la niña, el sentido que les da como principio..., ahí muestra una perspectiva auténtica a partir de una necesidad expresiva real. Es decir, no me han parecido pensamientos "colocados", se integran emocionalmente en la narración.

El final es muy tierno y bonito, y me habría gustado si no me pareciera evidente el intento de conseguir esa ternura, forzada o artificiosamente ingenua.

En general me ha gustado mucho, me deja ideas valiosas y algunos pasajes memorables, pero también la idea de complacencia de la autora y una sensación de artificio intermitente.

[Angela M]

While I was taken by the story of this mother and her twelve year old daughter, at 48% I just can’t read anymore about the Greek classics that are read and continuously referenced, some of which I’ve never heard of. Just too tedious. Bottom line , this is just not for me .

[Richard Derus]

On the 2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

As a mission statement you don't get a lot clearer than that one, the simple reflection on how hard it is to create a story afresh. The women in this story are unnamed, because naming is a deterministic act, a story's half over when you're named because identity isn't fluid after that. A label like mother or daughter is subject to refinement...whose mother? daughter of whom?...but a name stops the question, collapses the possibility in the narrative by making in the identity "mother" or "daughter" concrete to that one person.

Sicily's ancient land is littered with bits and fragments of many identities that seemed immovable in other times. Ruins of homes, temples, fields, volcanoes, none in their original condition and most only tentatively identified and that with modern superimposed names that we use in place of older names from other stories that built, were built from, other identities. What better place to tell the story of telling the story of building anew identities that were never anything except conditional.

Volcanic violent emotions are everywhere in this story of re/invention. The women are scraped raw and still bleeding without bandages or protection for their wounds as the mother's book tour takes them to this ancient place of ancestral memory for them both. With them is a piece of Classical foreknowledge...a head of Proteus...that belongs in this restless shaky earth because he came from here. And how fitting: coming home in the hands of people reduced to relationship, deprived of the story they shared by loss, amputation, severing of a former castmate; here Proteus and continue a fragment of the story this fragment of a created piece of an idea of his physical form, this godly figment of millions of minds back on eruptive, earthquakey home soil (not even the sea he was an assistant god of in those fevered imaginings). It is the story of this story in a hand-holdable bit of broken-off antique knick-knack.

Mother and daughter move through this not-really native ancestral world, mother doing the mother thing by wondering if her daughter is really going to be the woman she sees coming into focus. Is the Proteus a stolen fragment of patrimony, or a piece of the homeland carted to a frightening new world by a feisty, scared girl shifted by her needs into a simulacrum of male freedom? Does this mean there is a hard-edged channel for the fast-flooding rage of the world in her daughter, or is the idea of belonging uniquely to a time and a place moving her feelings into Earthly action on Proteus' behalf?

Stories have no beginning middle end. We impose those ideas on the world. Time...that thing we are slaves to, are shackled on the side of being dragged along always trying not to be crushed under the wheels of the misunderstood, mischaracterized "juggernaut"...has no inherent direction, the equations don't define beginning middle end. It isn't the gods, then, that created time. That was us.

So here are two women out of place and out of their time, defining new beginnings middles ends with Author Luiselli sweeping the temple steps for their ascent. It is masterful work. It deserves to define your time as beginning middle end.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award

A novel about a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her mother, traveling along the edge of somewhere, toward some other time frame. A novel in the middle, the middle of the novel. Or is it not a novel, but an essay? Perhaps the middle does not fit into the tighter architecture of a novel, the corset of plot. The middle feels more akin to the distracted, loose, meandering spirit of essaying. Maybe it will have to be an essay un

 
Mexican-American author Valeria Luiselli first English language novel “Lost Children Archive” (in my view best read alongside her companion non-fiction long-form essay “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions”) was longlisted for both the 2019 Women’s Prize and 2019 Booker Prize and in both cases disappointingly dropped at shortlist stage, but deservedly went on to win both the 2020 Folio Prize and 2021 Dublin International Prize.
 
In my view it was an ambitious (if not unflawed) literary, meta-fictional, deliberately fragmentary and part autofictional tale of a family road trip (including two rather oddly eloquent and intelligent young children) to the South West of the US, intermingled with historical stories of the war on Native Americans (which did draw some criticisms) and modern day migration from Mexico drawn together in a tale of both textual embedding, documentation and storytelling and of what the author sees as a multidecadal hemispheric conflict – a novel I found considerably enhanced on a second read and alongside the author’s extensive interviews and which I eventually concluded was brilliant (for all its faults).
 
And this her first novel since then has much in common with that novel – again literary, meta-fictional, deliberately fragmentary and part autofictional, and again a story of a road trip (here to the Island of Sicily) of a family (in fact with what is effectively the same but reduced family unit as the previous novel – but here just the mother and daughter with the father and step-son absent after a divorce).  And the theme of migration – and migratory patterns over decades – is again explicit in the novel.
 
Also key to the novel are the Greek classics – particularly the legend of the shape-shifting Proteus – and one wonders if that may well appeal to this year’s Booker Prize judge Mary Beard.
 
The main narrator – an author who has just “finished a project recording soundscapes and oral histories in the US-Mexico border and then passed through a slow, entangled divorce” (both of which also apply to Luiselli who has spent most of the time since her previous novel working on a project “Echoes from the Borderlands”) decides to travel around Europe with her seventh-grade daughter for book events on translations of her previous novel (as an aside another Booker Prize contender – Larissa Pham’s “Discipline” has a similar idea of a book tour) before ending in Catania - from where her maternal grandmother was a economic migrant to Mexico -and where she decides to stay for a period.
 
The grandmother (Nanna) (who eventually died in a Mexican asylum in the 1980s) was a farm labourer and dressing as a man was hired as a day labourer in an archaeological dig – sacked in ignominy when her sex is discovered but not before she had taken a piece of mosaic of Proteus which is passed to the narrator by her ageing eco and political activist mother just before she sets out on the trip.
 
The remainder of the novel tells mainly of the narrator and her daughter’s time in Sicily – including the daughter’s insistence that they return the mosaic (which she implicitly feels may have led to some form of curse of matrilineal inherited curse of unhappiness) and the two of them staying in the house of one of the narrator’s ex-lovers (who on eventually returning to his home forms an uneasy and altered relationship with the two). 
 
In the background Etna is erupting and wildfires – fanned by one of the many and varied winds who actually give the novel’s four parts their subtitles - are causing the potential need for the Western side of the Island to be evacuated, and politically there is a background of anti-immigrant protests (the narrator despairing that the locals don’t see that they too were once refugees and may soon be again).
 
The narrator tries to marshal her thoughts and writing ideas and experiences into some form of novel or essay (in the book’s very first lines her daughter asks “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, middle and an end?” – only at the novel’s end do we find out what role the daughter – who while older and so more capable than in “Lost Children Archive” still seems unnaturally precocious – has played in pulling the fragments into some sort of structure, as well as explaining the headings for the individual sections).
 
Those headings are from the same source as the novel’s title – Pliny’s Natural History which becomes something of a talisman for the daughter (who finds for example resonances between Etna’s lava flows and the fate of the two Pliny’s in the Vesuvius eruption).
 
The idea of “beginning, middle and end” also has a generational emphasis – the narrator effectively in a sandwich generation with both child care and parent care responsibilities.  Further it is cleverly linked to the migratory journey. There are also links to the ideas of past, present and future – concepts that the narrator thinks more fluid than many other people, and links to the idea of presentiments.
 
Memory is also an explicit theme of the novel – and further the narrator in the autofictional novel she is writing (rather than the one we are reading) decides to ask her mother to translate her novel as a way of keeping her mind active and staving off memory loss.   The daughter in this novel (we are reading) instead takes on more of the role of worrying about her grandmother (the narrator’s mothers) memory.   The narrator also worries that – particularly as her daughter attends readings of her own partly autofictional previous novel – that her daughter’s own memories are being shaped by those rather than her own actual experiences.   A quote from Pliny that starts “Mountains are the memories of the world” causes the daughter to change her insistence on returning the mosaic to the archaeological site (which my idea is perhaps more of its “middle”) and instead to its geological origins in Africa (which in itself gives a nice echo to the common ancestry of man, the anti-immigrant calls to “go back to Africa” and even to the way in which Sicily appears to have its geological origins as part of the African continent).
 
And that preceding paragraph shows I hope the way in which this is a novel of ideas and associations.
 
One of my favourite parts of the novel was how an improvised list of potential metamorphoses of Proteus as he (according to legend) tried to resist capture and the resulting compulsion to tell the past and future turn out to have become effectively (as we read the final section) a driving force for the daughter’s experiences in the novel and something of a (my words) memory palace for the reader to look back across the narrative.
 

Nanna also uncovered a series of mosaics in a much smaller room, a little vestibule. They were perfectly preserved, and depicted a scene from a myth about Proteus: the elusive, ever-shifting god of the sea, son of Poseidon and Phoenice, who was a prophet and also a shepherd of all the sea beasts. Proteus could see not only the future, but also the past and present in complete clarity. But he detested being asked about it, so the only way to get him to speak was if you captured him, held him down long enough, and compelled him. He would resist his captor by shape-shifting, transmuting, metamorphosing. He became a swordfish, a camera, a rainstorm, a jellyfish, a donkey, a toothbrush, fire, a boat, a book. A toothbrush? she asks.

 
Throughout, the novel the daughter both writes on illustrated postcards and takes polaroid snaps and these, posted ahead of an evacuation, are then cleverly included in the Appendix with some other printed scraps and images which feature in the story.  And I believe in the published version a QR coe will link to a “sonic translation” of the novel based on actual elementally-themed sound recordings made by the author in what will make the novel a genuine multimedia production.
 
Given the novel’s clear similarities to “Lost Children Archive” and my experience with that, I will almost certainly revisit the novel in detail when its published in a paper version and further when the author has given interviews around her inspirations and writing processes - and I suspect that a novel that I already rate highly will only increase in my estimation.
 
My thanks to 4th Estate, William Collins for an ARC via NetGalley
 

The first quality of plot, says Aristotle, is its completeness: plot is a whole. And a whole, he says, is simply that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the Poetics, he defines the middle as “that which itself comes after something else, and some other thing comes after it.” He relegates the middle to a kind of half-existence, as if the middle existed only by virtue of being that which lies between the beginning and the end, while not being either of them. Perhaps a defense of the middle is needed, a revindication of being in the middle, because eventually we have no choice but to be in the middle

[Chris]

Valeria Luiselli schreef met 'Begin midden einde' de (voorlopig) mooiste en rijkste roman die ik dit jaar las. Het is een zoekend, reizend, denkend, zinderend boek/roadmovie dat midden in het leven staat en waarin feit, fictie en tijd ondergeschikt zijn aan de vertelkracht, de verbeelding en de ideeënrijkdom van een auteur, een vrouw, een moeder, een dochter, een mens die moedig en kwetsbaar haar leven en werk in vraag blijft stellen.

Daarmee heb ik eigenlijk al alles gezegd. En tegelijk niets, want 'Begin midden einde' is ook geestig en intelligent. De bovengenoemde rijkdom aan ideeën wordt voor een groot deel gestuwd en gestuurd door de Griekse en Romeinse literatuur, filosofie en cultuur. Die gebruikt ze als raamwerk om enerzijds haar leven als vrouw, moeder, dochter en kleindochter te beschrijven en te overschouwen en anderzijds om haar schrijverschap kritisch en zoekend onder de loep te nemen.

Na haar scheiding, reizend op lezingentournee door Europa, samen met haar dochter aan wie ze thuisonderwijs geeft, is Valeria Luiselli neergestreken op zinderende Siciliaanse bodem; de ideale locatie om verleden, heden en toekomst te onderzoeken. De verbeelding wordt aangewakkerd door haar pientere, leergierige, eigenzinnige dochter, maar net zo goed door haar moeder en grootmoeder. Die laatste is afkomstig van Sicilië, dus dat eiland fungeert niet alleen als een historisch en mythologisch 'lieu de mémoire', maar ook als een plek waar haar wortels liggen en doet nadenken en herdefiniëren wat een thuis zou kunnen betekenen.

Mede door die zuiderse setting en het verwerkingsproces na een scheiding, maar zeker ook door de manier waarop Luiselli op zo'n ontwapenende en toch altijd literaire wijze haar dagen, twijfels en gemoedstoestand beschrijft, deed deze roman me denken aan een andere, onvergetelijk mooie leeservaring: de Fay-trilogie van Rachel Cusk (Outline, Transit & Kudos).

Het aandeel van het dochter-personage zorgt hier echter nog voor een extra verruimend en verrassend perspectief en narratief. En dan is er ook nog het laatste deeltje met ansichtkaarten, polaroids en kleine notities, dat me zowel aan W.G. Sebald als aan Patti Smith deed denken.

Enfin, er valt zo veel te ontdekken en te beleven in deze roman, die bij momenten ook nog eens spannend en actueel is, dat ik het net als het vergelijkbare, want net zo overweldigende Archief van verloren kinderen zeker ooit nog eens wil herlezen en ik deze keer mijn 4,5* naar boven afrond.

[Luna Miguel]

Hermoso homenaje a las relaciones madre-hijx mediadas por una amistad fascinante.

[Liz]

Beginning, Middle, End is the first book I’ve read by Valeria Luiselli. And I struggled with it. The writing is beautiful, full of ideas that had me really thinking. It felt more stream of consciousness than a straightforward narrative. I’ve heard her writing style called reflective narration and it fits. It’s a book about memory and memories - forgotten, distorted and even made up. The ideas evoked keep repeating, especially as regards identity, motherhood and the meaning of life. But I’m a reader that prefers a definite plot and this book lacked that.
The premise is that a writer has gotten divorced. She takes her twelve year old daughter with her to Sicily, the home of her grandmother. They are carrying a mosaic that the writer’s grandmother stole from an archeological dig. The book chronicles their journey across the island. Throughout, they ask big questions, often brought on by their reading of the classics. The mother is also writing a novel (but is it fiction or not-fiction?) about a woman whose mother might be developing dementia. There are lots of diversions from the plot (such as it is) - thoughts about language, history and philosophy.
This is a book I appreciated more than enjoyed. It made me think. Yet, I also never felt I understood either main character. They felt like vehicles to impart ideas rather than real people. And the ending, in which the writer’s daughter takes over the narrative, totally went over my head. It just ends.
My thanks to Netgalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage and Anchor for an advance copy of this book.

[Constantine]

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.

https://constantinebooks.blogspot.com...

[Milly Cohen]

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6WWC...

qué libro más bello, original, conmovedor, interesante, diferente, ágil, profundo, circular, se me acaban los elogios, de mis favoritos !!!!!
no quería que terminara,
se me enflaquecía el lado derecho del libro y y yo suspiraba,
y me lamentaba
lo rápido que lo leí
la espera valió la pena

Proteo, el dios que cambiaba de forma para no ser capturado, aparece como una sombra en la escritura de Valeria. Este libro también se me escapaba: empieza como ensayo, se vuelve diario, luego conversación, luego recuerdo. Nunca termina de quedarse quieto. Ni al final. Que final, uffff.

Me vuelan la cabeza los libros como estos en los que la ficción y la realidad juegan con la cabeza del lector.
También me sorprende la apuesta valiente por algo diferente, cuánto tiempo tardó en construirlo?

Un librazo sobre el poder de la imaginación, del diálogo, de las relaciones maternales y de las lecturas.

A mí que me chocan lo blurbs, los de la contraportada de Samantha Schweblin y Vila-Matas se quedan cortos.

[Ief Stuyvaert]

Boeken van zoekende schrijvers die van het zoeken het boek maken - ik ben er geen fan van.

Ik weet nu weer waarom: omdat het resultaat zich weliswaar in boekvorm presenteert, maar geen boek ís.

Omdat het niet af is, nooit af zal zijn.

Omdat het begin, midden noch einde heeft.

Het is zoeken en wroeten en het gaat maar door - de overpeinzingen, het eindeloos citeren, het bedenkelijk filosoferen, het getik-‘tap-tik-tap-tap’ op de laptop - tot het blubberig lava wordt.

Met tussentitels die nergens op slaan tot de ‘onthulling’ op de laatste pagina en dan nog altijd nergens op slaan.

Met kleurloze toeristen als nietszeggende voorbijgangers.

En met een compleet ongeloofwaardig dochterpersonage, dat ook nog eens de laatste 45 bladzijden mag vullen met het - tevergeefs - proberen rechtbreien van al wat krom is.

“Hoe vind ik het opnieuw uit, het verhaal, onze levens?”, vraagt de moeder/de schrijver/de achterflap.

Niét op deze manier.

[Ari Levine]

3.5, rounded down. Another autofiction, set in the same extended universe as Luiselli's Lost Children Archive, which shared many of the same flaws. While other reviewers have compared her to Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, this didn't have the same sharpness.

Seeking to rebuild their lives after a recent divorce, a Mexican novelist living in America travels to Sicily one summer with her 12-year-old daughter, whose precocious voice is virtually indistinguishable from hers. They move into the empty Catania apartment of her concert pianist lover, which is stocked with Loeb editions of the Greek and Latin classics, which they read aloud to each other.

The novel is an extended discourse on classical narrative theory, especially the Aristotelian unities, and the possibilities of eternal return. Many chapters encompass selections from Pliny's Natural History on volcanoes and Ovid's Metamorphoses on mythological transformations. They seek to return a mosaic of the shape-shifting Proteus from a Roman villa, originally stolen by her grandmother, to its rightful place.

My summary makes this sound much more linear than it actually was, because it read like a journal or commonplace book. There might have been enough material here for a longish short story, but it didn't hold my attention at novel length. The pace is especially languid and the structure is meandering, and I just found this too diffuse and discursive for my taste.

Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for sharing a free ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

[Kenya Stéphanie]

Estoy aprendiendo a llorar bajo el agua. ¿Tú sabes llorar bajo el agua?

en una playa de lanzarote me he terminado esta lectura entrañable sobre las hijas, las madres y las abuelas. es algo en medio de unas memorias y un ensayo (maybe autoficción?) escrito con mucha sencillez y liviandad.
lo que rodea esta historia de mujeres es muy especial: volcanes italianos, la metamorfosis de Proteo, la búsqueda de un nuevo principio, los peces espada y la artesanía en la escritura.

Si una historia tiene un principio, un medio y un fin, creo que ese cuento es un cuento sobre el medio, sobre lo que es estar a la mitad de las cosas.

🦈

[Katia N]

This is the novel focused on a mother and a daughter; or actually on a few mothers and daughters - four generations of women in one family that seem to lack a stable male presence, but this is the weakness of those men. It makes these women only stronger. Crucially, there is a tangible-intangible presence of another personage in this novel. It is of Proteus.

Proteus is a sea God in Greek mythology that has a tendency to shape-shift in order to get himself out of trouble, but also he is able to see the future. And this novel is just like that: it defies any genre or stable form and shamelessly shape-shifts from a travelogue to a family chronicle; from a family chronicle to auto-fiction; from a documentary to a fantastical. It does it with a warm story and gentle intertextuality. The story explores how it is to be 'sandwiched' in 'the middle' between 'the beginning' and 'the end' by being a mother of a preteen and a daughter of an older person and how to 'survive' this. It shows (not tells!) this old idea that every end is the beginning of something else and also that 'memories travel from person to person'.

There was also a part or maybe an appendix containing the postcards and polaroids featuring in the book. That was giving an additional layer to the point how porous and fragile is the border between reality and its representation. The traffic can go both ways.

The book is a sequel to The Lost Children Archive. That novel is very hard to beat. Having read that book, it seemed to me that this one was a bit repeating the schema with less pronounced (but still present) social component. Similar to that novel there was a part told by a child. I am personally not big fan of this trope. But it seems relevant and appropriate here. Overall- a very warm, sincere, smart but not pretentious novel that is easy to enjoy.

[Joachim Stoop]

Viel me eigenlijk wat tegen maar dit had
-meer dan met de merites van het boek zelve- vooral te maken met de vaststelling dat IK HELEMAAL KLAAR BEN MET DIT 'IK SCHRIJF EEN BOEK OVER EEN SCHRIJFSTER DIE EEN BOEK GAAT SCHRIJVEN EN WORDT DAT DAN MEMOIRE, AUTOFICTIE OF FICTIE, WIE ZAL HET ZEGGEN WANT WE GAAN ER SAMEN UITEINDELIJK ACHTERKOMEN DAT DIT ER EIGENLIJK NIET ECHT TOE DOET.'

Dit soort boeken vormen op zich al een kilometerslange file, maar binnen dit submetagenre is het geenszins het meest originele, meeslepende, inzichtelijke exemplaar. Van Luiselli verwachtte ik een hogere worp.

[Óscar Moreno (OscarBooker)]

Me ha fascinado el libro de una manera que no podría describir. Me parece precioso y preciso. Una madre realiza un viaje para auto descubrirse después de un divorcio junto a su hija. Una aventura hermosa que refuerza la unión entre madre e hija.

Una exploración muy profunda sobre diferentes temas: migración, machismo, misoginia, femenicidio, colonialismo, mitología, identidad, memoria, tiempo, inocencia y experiencia. Simplemente supero de manera exponencial toda expectativa que le tenía a la novela.

Se maneja una meta ficción de una forma magistral y las voces de los personajes es perfecta. Este es un libro que a mí me hubiera gustado escribir.

Conecté mucho y me asombra puesto que desconozco la razón.

[Clara Morales]

Tengo debilidad por los libros que unen atrevimiento formal con una trama bien montada (que no quiere decir una trama llenísima o imponente). Aquí hay truquitos narrativos y una buena dosis de metaliteratura, pero ni una cosa ni otra me ha parecido excesiva o pretenciosa, que puede pasar. Para mí, lo mejor es la estructura en tres partes: un principio interesado por los principios, un medio interesado por los nudos (y las mitades) y un fin interesado por los finales. Lo que más me ha costado es el dibujo de los personajes, me ha parecido que a veces les faltaba finura y se iban acercando al arquetipo. Con todo y con eso, empecé con cierta desconfianza y termino chapoteando en el entusiasmo.

[lecturas_niponas]

A este libro lo leí, lo escuché, lo seguí con la mirada mientras lo escuchaba.
Lo empecé y no sabía de qué se trataba, y me regaló los momentos más gratos con su compañía.
Hacía tiempo que no disfrutaba tanto un libro con más de un sentido activo.
Si hubiera sabido que los clásicos y la mitología griega aparecía tanto, tal vez yo misma y lo que creo saber de mí, me hubiera alejado de este libro.
Que bueno es sorprenderse.

[Paul Fulcher]

Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award

“Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.”

From Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli

And appropriately her first novel in seven years since that brilliant, Dublin Literary Award and Folio Prize winning work, is entitled Beginning Middle End.

The novel is narrated by a fictionalised author whose family and literary circumstances bear a strong resemblance to Luiselli’s, and who opens by telling us:

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.

I was eager to he 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 border-lands, 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.

She embarks on a trip in Europe with her (emotionally naive but intellectually precocious) 12 year old daughter which ultimately takes them to her grandmother’s native Sicily (before she later emigrated to Mexico, where the narrator was born).

They are accompanied by an ancient mosiac depicting Proteus that her grandmother took from an archeological dig on the island, one in which she worked in the guise of a man, until her true gender was discovered and she was expelled from the team.

The novel cleverly draws on the Proteus myth, and on Pliny’s natural histories, in a clever way that only came fully clear to be in the novel’s closing sections, the strongest (whereas the Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk mother + precocious child sections in the novel’s first 2/3rds started to drag a little towards the end).

Not for me quite as ambitious and complex a work as Lost Children Archive, although that is a very high bar. My own very limited knowledge of, and even more limited interest in, the classics another fact in my relative ranking of the two works. The novel also comes with a QR code to an accompanying soundscape, but that link wasn’t present in my, courtesy of Netgalley and the publisher, ARC.

Nevertheless a strong novel - 4.5 stars - and it will be interesting what Mary Beard and the Booker jury make of it as it would be a very worthy Booker nominee.

ASTROLOGY AND ASTRONOMY

A novel about a mother and her daughter, a daughter and her mother, traveling along the edge of somewhere, toward some other time frame. A novel in the middle, the middle of the novel. Or is it not a novel, but an essay? Perhaps the middle does not fit into the tighter architecture of a novel, the corset of plot. The middle feels more akin to the distracted, loose, meandering spirit of essaying. Maybe it will have to be an essay until it can be a novel again, an essay with a beginning, a middle and an end.

[Chris]

This is a smart, interesting, road trip kind of novel about beginnings, middles & endings, memory & imagination, fiction & not-fiction, and mothers & daughters. Absolutely magnificent and I loved it!
Thank you Penguin Random House US and Edelweiss for the ARC

[Shantha (ShanthasBookEra)]

"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."

A mother and her daughter arrive in Sicily during a summer of winds, volcano activity and storms. They are near ancient ruins where the narrator's grandmother grew up. Mother and daughter are learning how to begin again at the End of a divorce. They meet all kinds of people during their summer of road trips. The daughter becomes interested in their family history amd the history of the land. Simultaneously, the narrator's mother is showing signs of dementia. All of these circumstances amd soul searching results in questions about beginning and endings as well as what's in the middle. Highly philosophical with an intellectual tone including plenty of mythology. It is humorous and poetic at the same time.

The audiobook performance (7 hours 38 minutes) by the author, Maia Enrigue Luiselli and Marta Lopez Astrain feels authentic to the region.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Knopf, PRH Audio and Valerie Luiselli for the gifted advance reader's copy, advance listening copy and finished copy. All opinions are my own. 🎧📚

[ikersito]

la mejor sensacion que puede dejarte un libro al terminarlo es que te quedes sin palabras y no seas capaz de procesar todo lo que acabas de leer.

principio, medio, fin de valeria luiselli es un libro sobre una transformacion. en la historia seguimos a una madre y una hija, que tras un divorcio, se establecen en sicilia. alli, rodeadas por volcanes, peces espada, mitologia y mucha literatura clásica empiezan a reconstruir una relación en la que solo se tienen la una a la otra.

valeria habla en el libro del principio de las cosas, de como cada momento de nuestras vidas supone de alguna manera el fin y el comienzo de algo. de cómo la virtud de nuestras existencias reside precisamente en ese medio, ese estado de transición en el que descubres, te informas y sobre todo, vives.

me ha parecido una novela fantastica que trata la maternidad desde un punto de vista muy novedoso, en el que no solo la madre enseña a su hija, sino que aprende de ella tambien. la historia esta repleta de cuentos mitologicos y descripciones de la naturaleza que hacen que te sientas totalmente sumergido en la cultura siciliana.

creo que no me cansare nunca de recomendar este libro

[Carol]

Buenísimo. Una maravilla. Un viaje a través de la familia, el recuerdo y las relaciones.

[Korcan Derinsu]

4.5/5

Son söyleyeceğimi baştan söyleyeyim; Beginning Middle End, en sevdiğim Valeria Luiselli romanlarından biri oldu. Bunun da başlıca sebebi, Luiselli'nin zaten sevdiğim o kurgu ile deneme arasında dolaşan hâlinin burada bana çok organik gelmesi.

Bir tarafta hafızasını yavaş yavaş kaybeden bir anne, ortada kendi hayatını yeniden kurmaya çalışan bir kadın, diğer tarafta kimliğini ve kendi hikâyesini yeni yeni inşa eden bir kız var. Geçmişten bize yalnızca anılar değil; davranışlar, korkular, anlatılar ve hatta suskunluklar da kalıyor. Ama Luiselli bunu kaderci bir yerden ele almıyor. İnsanın kendisine aktarılanlarla ne yapacağına, hangilerini yanında taşıyıp hangilerini geride bırakacağına ve bütün bunların içinden kendisini nasıl yeniden inşa edebileceğine bakıyor.

Romanın başlangıç, orta ve son fikriyle oynama biçimi de çok güzel. Hayatın gerçekten böyle düzenli bölümlere ayrılıp ayrılamayacağını, bir son sandığımız şeyin başka bir başlangıç olup olmadığını sürekli sorguluyor. Boşanmanın ardından anlatıcının yaptığı da tam olarak bu; yepyeni biri olmaktan çok, kendisine kalan parçalarla kim olduğunu yeniden anlamaya çalışmak. Anne-kız ilişkisinin giderek değişmesi de bunun çok güzel bir uzantısı. Başlangıçta kızını taşıyan ve ona dünyayı anlatan kişi anneymiş gibi görünürken zamanla roller kayıyor; kız sorular sormaya, geçmişin peşine düşmeye ve hatta hikâyenin yönünü belirlemeye başlıyor. Bir kuşağın hikâyesinin diğerine geçişini yalnızca anlatmakla kalmayıp romanın yapısına da yedirmesini çok sevdim. Bir de Sicilya var tabii. Arkeolojik kazılar, aile geçmişi, mitoloji, volkanlar, rüzgârlar... İnsanların kendi küçük hikâyeleriyle çok daha eski, jeolojik ve mitolojik zamanların yan yana gelmesi romana çok güzel bir katman kazandırıyor.

Luiselli benim için her zaman çok iyi fikirleri olan ama bazen o fikirlerin romanın önüne geçtiğini düşündüğüm bir yazar. Burada ise fikirle duygu arasındaki dengeyi çok daha iyi kurmuş. Zeki olduğunun sürekli farkında olduğunuz ama zekâsını göstermek için romanı durdurmayan bir metin. Üstelik bütün bu hafıza, kimlik ve anlatı meselelerinin altında çok basit ve çok dokunaklı bir soru var: İnsan kendisine verilmiş bir hayatın içinden kendisine ait yeni bir hayat kurabilir mi? Benim için cevabı kadar bu soruyu sorma biçimi de çok güzeldi. Kesinlikle en sevdiğim Luiselli'lerden biri.

[churrosconclipper]

me pasa una cosa con luiselli: sus libros son más bien experiencias que, de tanto hablar del tiempo, terminan escapando de él. por eso siento que no puedo valorar este librito de forma convencional. si lo hiciese, diría que buena parte del libro se me ha atragantado bastante.

aunque entiendo el sentido de esas divagaciones, creo que podrían haber estado mucho más afinadas. el tramo central se siente demasiado vago, no lo suficientemente atinado ni lúcido. sus exploraciones no terminan de cerrarse, pero tampoco de abrirse; no dialogan entre sí ni te conducen hacia ningún pensamiento especialmente revelador. en general, siento que no se sostienen demasiado bien por sí mismas.

entiendo que quizás la autora quería jugar con el tiempo y transmitir esa exasperación de los días que no avanzan. incluso pienso que, de no haberlo leído en tan poco tiempo, habría conectado más con algunos de esos pequeños destellos que va dejando en forma de frases. pero también cabe la posibilidad de que simplemente no termine de alcanzar aquello que se proponía, y ya.

me ha pasado algo parecido a lo que me ocurrió con desierto sonoro: el final compensa, de alguna manera, muchas de las páginas anteriores. quizá luiselli no sabe escribir medios, o quizá no quiere que tengan demasiada relevancia. en cualquier caso, el archivo que incluye al final termina por sostener el resto de la obra. me parece fascinante la forma en que une realidad y ficción, y cómo ambas se retroalimentan constantemente. las polaroids son hermosas, y me parece digno de admiración que una artista como ella no recurra a herramientas de ia ni nada parecido, sino que vaya a los lugares, los explore y construya desde ahí la historia. su proceso creativo me despierta muchísimas preguntas. el propio libro también.

aun así, sé que si no fuese especialmente fan de algunos de sus recursos, la lectura se me habría hecho bastante infumable. no conecté demasiado con la historia, ni con los mitos, ni con casi nada de lo que propone, así que para mí ha sido una lectura curiosa, pero también bastante aburrida. esperaba quedar más atrapado por su reflexión sobre el tiempo, un tema que me fascina, pero aquí aparece presentado de una forma mucho menos hilada que en desierto sonoro.

quizás es culpa mía por llegar esperando una experiencia parecida a la que fue leer aquel libro. aun así, me queda la duda de si luiselli ya habrá escrito su mejor obra y todo lo que venga después serán intentos parciales de alcanzar algo parecido. no me gusta pensar así de ningún autor, pero sí siento que este libro podría haber dado un poco más de sí. aunque, al mismo tiempo, entiendo que sea una obra laxa. le pega serlo.

no sé. está bien.

[Andrea (abooksplace)]

Al principio quería entender pero no podía.
Al medio pensé que Valeria Luiselli estaba dando palos de ciego, me sentía triste por que una de mis escritoras favoritas aquí pareciera perdida (ella insiste en entrevistas en que es ficción pero el libro deja traslucir muchas de sus dudas y miedos reales del proceso de escritura).
Al fin todo cobra sentido y se siente una obra total.

Me alegro de haberme mantenido en la lectura, aunque quizás no siempre súper conectada (nota para la Andrea del futuro: sería buena la relectura); de otra manera me habría perdido un libro tierno y lleno de una búsqueda inquieta por todos los intereses de la autora: viaje/migración, narración/escritura, no/ficción, memoria/relato, familia/unidad, mito/realidad.

No me parece el mejor libro para empezar a leer a Luiselli. Creo que la experiencia de haberla leído antes acaba enriqueciendo la experiencia de leer este libro.

[Brenda]

I was excited to receive an ARC copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher. With all the great reviews I couldn’t wait to dive in. I am not familiar with any of “the classics” or their authors. I have zero interest in mythology. The time spent on these two subjects made the book completely BORING for me. There was no plot to speak of and what there was came off as simply bizarre. Characters were mother, daughter, grandmother, no names. The twelve year old has conversations with her mother like she is 35. I am scratching my head trying to figure out how so many rated it fantastic, 5 stars, memorable, beautiful prose, etc etc. I found it to be a complete waste of my precious reading time. Since I’m the minority, best to give it a go. I just can’t figure out how I missed so much of what so many others saw in this book.

[AndaReadsTooMuch]

I wanted to love this. I did. It made me think of Beach Music, when a parent leaves the US to raise their kid in Italy after a devastating loss. Told with no dialogue, almost as a stream of consciousness, I struggled to connect with the narrator. Her daughter acted much younger than the 12 she was supposed to be, and I just didn’t…get it? This wasn’t so much a plot-driven narrative as it was deeply introspective.It was beautifully written, and vivid. I don’t think I’m the target audience for this one.

Beginning middle end hits shelves July 28.

Thank you to Knopf for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own.

[Negativedialecticsandglitter]

Leído a punto de avistar el Etna por primera vez, en medio de la enésima ola de calor del verano. Hace diez días el volcán siciliano entró en erupción. Como la memoria y como Proteo en la novela de Luiselli, el Etna se metamorfosea cada año, deja de ser lo que era para convertirse en alguna otra cosa, al igual que este mundo nuestro, herido, que arde, se contrae y se lamenta desde las entrañas, quizás queriéndonos decir que estamos en la parte final de algo. Principio, medio, fin. Un libro precioso.