Valeria Luiselli: Beginning Middle End (Book Review)

Memory has its own methods of excavation. What one generation buries, another may uncover without knowing what it has found. In Beginning Middle End, the soil of Sicily holds a family history whose meanings are still being negotiated: the narrator’s grandmother once worked here on an archaeological dig, and now the narrator arrives with her daughter, carrying the aftermath of a failed marriage. Elsewhere, her mother’s memories are slipping away. Between that loss and the accumulating impressions of a child approaching adolescence, she must reckon with how much of their shared past she can claim to understand. Across four generations of women, recollection moves unevenly, gathering in one life as it recedes from another. The search for origins becomes an inquiry into the stories we entrust to our children, and what happens when they begin to tell them back. The island brings a different scale to this uncertainty. Its ruins and volcanic disturbances place the women’s lives alongside…