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 histories that exceed any family’s capacity to remember, while encounters with migrants and shopkeepers keep those histories tethered to the present. Yet the novel’s intimacy rests in smaller exchanges: a meal prepared together or the shifting allegiances of a chess game. Through these daily negotiations, the daughter begins to exert her own narrative authority. Her questions alter the direction of their travels and unsettle the mother’s account of how they came to be here. The narrator is struck by the permeability of beginnings and endings, and the inarticulability of what comes between. Belonging reaches her as “an echo of someone else’s belonging.” Later, she muses that perhaps the middle is all there is. Her answers remain as fragmentary as her current sense of self, drawing from their new yet ancient surroundings as if strands of memory could still be woven into tapestries for their becoming. As Mount Etna erupts in the backdrop, a looming threat and a point of fascination, the mood proceeds in curls and thermals.
In many ways, the novel is as much about the machinations behind its own creation as the story it seeks to create. “Why is the language of fiction writing so full of real estate?” the narrator asks early on, bringing a valid concern to our penchant for thick description. The question also exposes the possessive grammar of storytelling: to establish a setting can become a way of claiming it; to explain a daughter can become a way of occupying her future. Her resistance to journalists and critics who draw a straight, unbreakable line between her life and her words belongs to this same inquiry. “I have, of course, used slivers of my own life,” she admits, because “I wouldn’t know what else to write with.” Lived experience becomes the building material of fiction, retaining edges that can cut the hand arranging it. As she contemplates how her daughter, now ripped from the master narrative of family life, must learn to navigate the world anew, her own position as a daughter passes beneath the distorted magnifying glass of retrospection.
The novel, accordingly, unfolds in a strangely beautiful vignette style, each passage carrying its own title while flowing into the larger story taking shape in real time. Their separateness gives uncertainty room to breathe. An image can arrive before its significance becomes apparent; a thought may find its consequence several pages later. Many of these images suggest the universe and its natural phenomena, sometimes surreal and distant, because a solar system in need of a new name is forming between mother and daughter. They are trying to reinvent their lives in a home away from home, learning the pull of a changed relation without knowing where its orbit will lead. The daughter’s questions exert a force the mother can neither calculate nor keep outside the story. What appears to be fragmentation gradually reveals the gravitational field of another consciousness entering the composition.
The narrator quickly realizes that there are things she would rather withhold from her daughter, or reveal only through the lens of obfuscation, where the author’s art takes over in service of life. Invoking Greek theater, she observes that “the violence happens backstage.” Concealment becomes a problem of form, asking us to consider what an omission protects and what it allows to continue unchallenged. The daughter’s desire for a Polaroid camera, whose images eventually make themselves metaphysically known at the back of the book, establishes a nuanced reciprocity between what one observes and what one makes of the observation. Her photographs give another gaze a place within the broader account, preserving evidence she cannot entirely explain. All the while, they are caught up in moments of inconspicuous portent: a mosquito crushed on a pillow; a ladybug occupying a wall. A plume hangs in the sky in the wake of Etna’s wrath, the residue of a thought too large for the earth to contain.
Staying in the apartment of the mother’s lover, a pianist and collector of Greek and Roman classics, they begin reading through the works from which the novel’s section titles are taken. The warrior mythos of the Odyssey brings its troubled promise of return, while the destruction of the Aeneid presses loss into the service of a future homeland. Between these monumental arrangements, the unrest of Trojan Women exposes the lives left beneath heroic accomplishment. The myths hover as a constant pool beneath the action, into which the characters may dip a hand or a foot and emerge with something substantial to hold in the present moment. Reading becomes one of their daily negotiations, with the daughter’s presence changing what can be asked of an ancient text. An epic opens differently when a child is there to question the account it gives of survival.
One day, mother and daughter attend a performance of Trojan Women, with incidental music by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou. Brief as it is, the sequence feels strangely intimate and private, reducing the novel to a single kernel of curiosity from which it seems to sprout all over again. Euripides’ tragedy, first performed in 415 BCE, attends to the captive women after Troy’s destruction, granting the aftermath of conquest its devastating duration. The scene in Luiselli’s novel is also the scene of an earthquake, shaking experience to its foundations and drawing the act of witnessing into the instability of the ground beneath it. What the spectators encounter onstage passes into their bodies.
In my earlier review of Karaindrou’s Trojan Women, I heard its choral odes as vertebrae of story and music and traced the way its related themes changed their instrumental clothing from one visage to another. Returning to those impressions through Luiselli, I find a new resonance in that fluidity. The family’s stories also acquire different bodies as they pass between women, each voice altering the weight of what it carries. Karaindrou’s chorus gathers suffering into a shared utterance, opening a space beyond the solitary narrator’s reach. Within the novel, that possibility matters acutely: the mother must find a form that can hold her anguish without requiring her daughter to become its instrument. Music lends this difficulty a tangible melodic beauty, allowing what cannot yet be articulated to enter the room.
When the pianist returns to his apartment and works his way into their lives, he creates another ripple in that water. His words also cut theirs short, however, introducing a disruption that cannot hold its own in their orbit. The room’s borrowed hospitality begins to reveal its conditions. Read alongside the narrator’s question about fiction and real estate, this disturbance makes possession painfully immediate, entangling the right to speak with the right to inhabit. As mother and daughter plan their escape, things turn inward and outward simultaneously. Their departure gives their relation room to continue, even as it requires them to leave the shelter where it has been taking shape. The road carries them toward family history while allowing the daughter’s questions to travel beyond the acoustics of someone else’s home.
The narrator wants to “write a reverse catastrophe: from the end of the world to the beginning of it; from the loss of memory to the first image of the world imprinted on a big brown eye.” As details of her lineage emerge, whether through an archaeological discovery or a shipwreck, we find places in which to fit our own. Their road trip begins returning a piece of genetic history to its origins, and the geography without becomes less important than the border crossings within. Yet the first image belongs to an eye the mother cannot see through. When the daughter picks up the proverbial pen and finishes the story, the direction of inheritance changes. Beginnings and endings take another shape through the people to whom we pass slivers of ourselves, our identities blurring in the watering eyes of humanity writ large. The mother’s longing for an origin must make room for someone else’s beginning.
The book ends with postcards and photographs, its archival images standing beside the daughter’s Polaroids. These materials extend the transfer of narrative authority into physical margins. The older photograph carries the burden of having outlived its occasion; the instant image is already separating from the moment that produced it. Neither supplies the whole life we might ask it to recover. Their incompleteness asks us to attend to the distance between evidence and invention, looking closely without converting every surface into an explanation. The daughter’s images preserve the freedom of an attention that has wandered beyond the mother’s prose. At the edge of the frame, something remains in motion, declining the stillness we have mistaken for understanding.
There is also a sonic parallel to the novel in the form of recordings made on site in Sicily and the Aeolian Islands by Charles de Montebello and Ricardo Giraldo. Alongside raw field recordings, 12 sound mixes form “constellations” between locations. A timeline follows the novel’s structure, while a separate soundscape offers its sonic environment without narration. The daughter’s postcards can be read and heard; photographs accompany videos. Whether immersing oneself underwater at Basiluzzo or in the evening ambience of Caltagirone, there is much to be felt and heard. The more one explores these places, the more they reveal the people who live and work there, whose lives intersect ephemerally to become part of the landscapes they inhabit. This is palpable in Catania’s fish market, but even in the absence of flesh, humanity can be felt in the winds of Scopello and the eruptions of Mount Etna. The assembled portrait lets the setting exceed its description, occupying the ear with pressures that have no obligation to become a plot.
That possibility returns us to the narrator’s reverse catastrophe, now turned toward a future she cannot arrange. Perhaps the daughter will one day listen to these waters and think of no one in her family. A sound her mother associated with loss may enter her life under an entirely different sign. The thought hurts precisely where love has mistaken remembrance for its only means of moving on. Beneath the sea, an unheard movement passes through stone; above it, a child is growing into the right to forget. The strands woven into the tapestry of her becoming may loosen without destroying it. An inheritance might endure most fully at the moment it ceases to point toward the person who gave it. The hand opens, allowing something loved to escape the duty of returning.
