Faces in the crowd

Author's name: Valeria Luizleidar Publisher: Dar Al-Mada for Publishing and Distribution Year of publication: 2019 Literary classification: Novel Brief about the book: Faces in the crowd by Valeria Luizleidar ... in the heart of Mexico City, a woman, stuck in a house and in a marriage she cannot settle into nor abandon, 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 twenties of the twentieth century, named Gilberto Owen, a marginal figure from the Harlem Renaissance, and a wanderer on 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 New York subway. 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, the real, the imaginary, and memories intertwine, and their lives are linked across decades, forming a solitary elegy for love and loss. *** At the subway station, the silhouettes of these faces in the crowd are flower petals on a wet, black branch... Ezra Pound.