Valeria Luiselli, who teaches at Bard College, begins Beginning Middle End with a daughter asking her writer mother, “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” The book takes that challenge seriously, even as it questions who gets to decide the shape of a family’s story.
The narrator is a writer emerging from a divorce and a difficult book. She takes her teenage daughter out of school and travels through Europe for readings. They settle in Sicily, where the narrator’s grandmother once worked as an archaeologist. Mother and daughter bring along an ancient mosaic depicting Proteus, the Greek sea god who changes shape to evade questions. Where the mosaic came from, why the grandmother took it, and what ought to happen to it now send them across the island.
Luiselli could have built a conventional quest around the stolen artifact. Instead, the mosaic draws out competing accounts of the grandmother and gives the daughter a problem her mother cannot settle for her. She disputes the narrator’s explanations, asks more precise questions, and develops theories of her own. Proteus fits a book in which people change shape, but his uncertain history also gives these travelers a reason to disagree.
The narrator wants the trip to mark a clean beginning. Divorce has ended one version of family life; the months abroad might allow another to take form. Her daughter complicates that hope. She misses things her mother may wish to leave behind and has opinions about the men entering their lives. After her mother spins a theory about playlists and the men she has loved, the daughter recommends that her next boyfriend be a boat. “You mean sailor?” her mother asks. “No, boat.” Luiselli lets that humor interrupt the narrator’s learned reflections without diminishing either woman.
The novel moves by interruption. Short passages accommodate archaeology, Pliny, weather, sex, family recollection, and photography. Sicily’s winds keep changing direction; the narrative follows suit. The narrator wonders if the middle of a novel might have to become an essay before it can be a novel again. That describes this one. Some passages wander farther than they need to, and Luiselli’s habit of explaining an image can dull one that was already vivid. Readers waiting for the mosaic to pull every digression into a single line may watch that line vanish.
Still, the detours have a cumulative force. The narrator occupies the crowded middle of her life, with a daughter moving toward adulthood and a mother growing more vulnerable at a distance. Her work as a novelist makes that position more fraught. How many of her daughter’s memories has she borrowed for fiction? Could the written version outlast the daughter’s own account? These are ethical questions for a writer, but also familiar ones for any parent who has told a child what happened before the child was old enough to say otherwise.
The daughter eventually takes up the unfinished account and writes to her grandmother about the trip, her mother’s fears, and plans she has kept to herself. Scenes we thought we knew open again from another vantage point. Her voice gives the book its strongest stretch: She has inherited a family’s stories, but she can inspect them, challenge them, and make something new. At the close of her account, she tells her grandmother that the book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. “And this is the end.”
Except Luiselli turns the page. A final section, “Proteus: Prima Materia (Mistral),” presents an envelope’s worth of postcards, archival images, and Polaroids from the journey. The daughter’s postcards keep asking after her grandmother’s memory. The photographs preserve small sights that no polished account could entirely absorb: “Ma peeing near Philosophiana,” a boat, mountain smoke, “Mama by the window.” They can’t prove tales of prophecy and time travel, or show what happens after the pair set out by boat.
The daughter gets to write an ending; the images keep the past available for another telling. By then, wildfires are approaching, and mother and daughter are preparing to escape Sicily by boat. The Mistral makes sailing easier but drives the flames toward them, giving the final section its name. Luiselli leaves us with things to look at and no final authority over them. The novel fulfills the daughter’s request while making clear why a family’s story can never be finished by one voice.
