Valeria Luiselli’s Rapturous New Novel

“I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling.” The words of Valeria Luiselli’s narrator, describing reading Sontag for the first time. Yes, yes, yes, I wrote in the margins. Not only on that page, but almost every other. I wrote down the microchemical raptures I was having, one after the next, from beginning to end of this revelatory novel.

I went into the already a fan of Lueselli’s work, having loved the innovation, humor, depth of thought, and just plain great writing evident throughout her essay collection, two novels, and last year’s gut punch of a long essay, , about her experience as a volunteer court translator for undocumented migrant children in New York and a road trip to the border she took with her children and husband, who was also born in Mexico. That same road trip inspired , a semi-autobiographical gloss that Lueselli skillfully crafts without dipping into the pedantic accumulations that sometimes overwhelm such books.