Faces in the crowd

A brief about the book in the heart of Mexico City a woman, stuck in a house and in a marriage she cannot dwell in or abandon, she thinks about her past. She decides to write a novel about her past days in a publishing house in New York City, about strangers who became lovers, and about ghosts and poets who inhabited her neighborhood. And she writes especially about her obsession, in her youth, with an obscure Mexican poet from the 1920s, named Gilberto Owen, a marginal figure from the Harlem Renaissance, wandering the subway platforms in Manhattan, and a friend and rival of Federico García Lorca. During her writing, Gilberto comes back to life on paper: a lonely unknown man living on the margins of writing and drinking circles in Harlem, at the start of the Great Depression, also haunted by the ghost of a woman in a red coat traveling on the subway in New York. As if each story echoes the other. Which one imagines the other? Are they two ghosts searching for a way back to reality? In distorted mutual mirrors, reality, imagination, and memories intertwine, and their lives are linked across decades, forming a solitary elegy about love and loss.*** At the subway station, the shadows of these faces in the crowd, flower petals on a wet black branch.. The author’s name Valeria Luizelli. Number of pages 186. Year of publication 2019. Publisher Dar Al-Mada for Printing, Publishing, and Distribution. The book cover is a paperback.