Bookseller Chats: Sidewalks
We are lucky enough to have several booksellers on staff who love translated literature, so celebrating Women in Translation Month is more an exercise in restraint than anything.
Most people are probably familiar with Valeria Luiselli’s most recent novel Lost Children Archive and her essay collection Tell Me How It Ends, which both delve into the crisis on the Mexican-American border. In her earlier essay collection Sidewalks, Luiselli guides the reader between Venice, New York, and Mexico City with her signature combination of intelligence and voracious curiosity. To round out our celebration of WiT Month on the blog, we’ve decided to share the following exchange between our booksellers Danni and Nika about the 2014 collection.
Danni: I'm so glad that you've read Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney. I found this book to be like none other I'd ever read. This was the first book I read by her, and it convinced me of undisputed brilliance. Perhaps, your reaction is different, in any case, I'd love to hear it.
Nika: This was also my first time reading Valeria Luiselli, and I thought Sidewalks was stimulating and completely original. I especially love the way the essays are structured in short passages; it adds so much to the movement of the essays as well as the cohesion of the collection. Her candidness–about her subjects, her thinking, and herself–kept the book from falling into the pitfalls that often kill nonfiction for me.
Which essay(s) has stayed with you? Why do you think that is?
Nika: Strangely enough, "Cement" made the most notable impression on me. It strikes me as more of an interlude than an essay, given its length, but it was very powerful. The essay seems to encapsulate a lot of the themes Luiselli explored throughout the collection: it covered the relationship between people who exist in the same space, the relationship between the individual and the city, and erasure through change all in a paragraph. The other essay that stuck out to me was "Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Space" because it resonated with my own interest in built space and affinity for empty corners and forgotten spaces.
Danni: My first impression of Luiselli is that she's the most brilliant contemporary writer. Although Sidewalks is rather short, it is powerful in its economy. The mental real estate needed to thoroughly analyze place both as a physical realm and as a created emotional one impressed me—and still does.
“Flying Home” and “Relingoes: The Cartography of Empty Spaces” were the ones that stayed with me. I read this collection within a few months of my return to the US from being in Germany for a year. “Flying Home” made me think about the idea of home and what New York City meant to me now that I had finally been abroad to the country I'd always most wanted to visit. Not only did I visit Germany, but I lived there. I spoke the language, made friends, and developed a routine. The connection there was not imaginary but real. Meanwhile, my relationship to New York City felt imaginary as I started to encounter places that I once knew but with a year's absence had disappeared. She wrote on page 74:
They exist as long as we keep thinking of them, imagining them; as long as we remember them, remember ourselves there, and, above all, as long as we remember what we imagined in them.
I underlined this because I think there is truth to it. A place is a composite of memory, thought, and imagination and it becomes hard to disentangle all of that when, at least for me, the identity of a person is tied to a place. So much of how I understand myself is as a New Yorker and if the city changes how do I change? Which New York City am I referring to when I call myself a New Yorker?
Nika: I'd love for you to elaborate on how "Flying Home" affected your understanding of your relationship with New York. Reading about identity always brings your own ideas of home and identity to mind, but I think that's especially true when you're away from home or in a place that you know you can't stay. Did the book make you reevaluate your relationship with New York?
Danni: "Flying Home" put in print the ideas that were rattling around my mind. I literally wrote, "I want to write about Brooklyn this way" between the passage Magdelena and Ameca. I think what I meant by that is that I'm so close to Brooklyn. I have so many emotions that I don't think I can analyze it. While flying to JFK from Frankfurt Airport, I was thinking so many things about what it means that I'm back and, of course, I was looking at my plane moving across the interactive map. I learned that the U.S. is not as northern as I thought. New York City is closer to the Equator than Saarbrücken, Germany. That is the city I lived in.
What did you think about the analysis of space and how this reflects, creates, and erases identity?
Nika: As I mentioned in my initial email, I’m very interested in the relationship between space and identity, so I was excited by this dimension of the book. Language is a crucial dimension of belonging and identity, and one that doesn't always receive as much engagement as it merits in my opinion. I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here, but hopefully it will make sense by the end.
In his essay ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’ from At The Mind’s Limit, Jean Améry wrote of the oppressive weight his native German dialect acquired (he was originally from Austria) and the language of his exile:
La table will never be the table; at best one can eat one’s fill at it. Even individual vowels, and though they had the same physical qualities as our native ones, were alien and remained so.
In this passage, he illuminates the dangers of language, its silences and inadequacies, and the places where it gives out beneath meaning. Despite the vast difference in context, I think Luiselli is aware of–and expresses–the failures of language. To my mind, it’s an especially relevant point if you’re writing about space and identity, because they are easily clarified through language but just as easily alienated, obscured, and erased. Essays like “Alternative Routes” and “Relingos: The Cartography of Empty Spaces” actively engage with language such that Luiselli can write about identity and space the same way that we often experience language in relation to identity and space–obliquely.
Danni: For me, language and geography are really all that identity is. When we conceive of ourselves, I think, where we are is not just in space but in time. The words we use and in what language are a dimension of that conception. In a very existential way, I believe that all other sources of identity stem from those two.
Nika: It’s funny to have spent so much time over the years thinking about identity but still have nothing like a personal definition of it. I say personal because I’ve encountered many academic ones, as I’m sure you have as well. I guess that I hesitate because you don't have to communicate something for it to be part of your identity, although vocalizing it in relation to others may provide relief. On the other hand, what do we do with the things that are true about ourselves that there is no language for? Maybe a question for another time–each time I settle on a position I immediately begin to question it, so we could be here for a while.
The structure of several of the essays use directions and street names as section titles. What do you think this contributed to the essays and/or the collection?
Danni: I think the use of names of landmarks or structures made the essays' form reflect the content, and I've always been a huge lover of when the content of a book and its form mirror each other. I think it's a clever way to further emphasize an author's point.
Nika: I came up with the question about the section titles partly because I myself wasn't entirely sure through my reading. What’s the difference between feeling an affinity for a place and being from there or calling it home? Cities offer interesting case studies in this regard, with the ebb and flow of people coming, staying, leaving, and visiting. When traveling, I often ground myself in the things that are part of every city: street signs, graffiti, construction notices, abandoned lots. Reading these essays, the directions and notices had the same rhythm as irregular city blocks and gave the collection a sense of shared texture. Which is to say, in many words, that I agree that the book’s form mirrors its content to its benefit.
Danni: You asked, "What’s the difference between feeling an affinity for a place and being from there or calling it home?" and I think that's a question of language, not emotion. I don't mean to impose my view on your world, this is my interpretation. What does home mean? Is affinity a suitable substitute? Which word matches the emotion?
Nika: It’s not an imposition at all. You’re correct in pointing to the signifier/signified issue of language here. I don’t know if I meant the question in a linguistic or emotional sense, so I appreciate the distinction you draw. I think the difficulty is that home can be people rather than places, so in a sense ‘home’ could be any place regardless of affinity.
What do you think of the relationship between language(s) and the city in this collection?
Danni: To best answer the question, I'm going to share another quotation from the book. In the essay, “Stuttering Cities”, on page 62, the subheading Bridge under repair, she wrote:
When I returned to live in Mexico at the age of fourteen, after twelve years away, I spoke Spanish correctly, but not well. I was able to say a phrase but not twist it around, take it apart. The Spanish I spoke belonged to slow, dispassionate conversations around the breakfast table. The Spanish spoken by people in the street was a living language, rapid and vibrant, and I found it impossible to get my teeth into it. I stuttered, I trembled when I spoke, suddenly went gravely silent in the middle of a sentence, My language was full of holes.
In the margins next to this I wrote, "This is exactly!" Again my most salient identity is the one tied to geography, so when I think of how I speak I think of Brooklyn. I think of the Brooklyn slang, the sounds of different languages, and I think of my accent and how I once spoke a very different tongue growing up. I spoke what many poor Black and Latin people speak in Brooklyn, Black English. With that came an attitude and pronunciation that when I went away to college in the Pacific Northwest and then to Germany, I largely lost. For me, Brooklyn sounds a certain way for many different ethnic groups and communicates and I felt I pretty much couldn't communicate how I once did. I think I spent and continue to spend much of my life in translation.
Nika: Language and the city….there’s a lot to say here, but I think I started saying it in my previous response to your question about space/place and identity. That is, language is a necessary bridge between feeling and expressing. Even the way we conceive of ourselves is indelibly affected by the language (or languages) we are steeped in, so it doesn’t feel like a leap to say that language is deeply embedded in thinking about “the city” and particular cities. It was definitely something Luiselli navigated very well throughout the collection.
I was struck by the lines you quoted from “Stuttering Cities” as well, and I have a clear memory of pausing to think after reading them. Though the version of English I speak hasn't changed very much, living in the UK my language acquired a different texture and movement, which was most notable by the way it bent my accent. Reading these lines, I wondered about how we find grounding in language and, when we do, how we hold on to it.
Danni: Isn't it funny how we speak differently based on the perception we believe our interlocutor has of how we speak? Even if your language didn't change, the dialect and cadence you were around are very different and I think that's something.
I find myself changing how I speak based on how I believe my speech is or would be received by the person I am speaking to. That is certainly not a new phenomenon. It's called code-switching which most people in the world do and many people of color do in the US.
Nika: I completely agree. There are so many dimensions here.
