Interesting but hard to follow and I ended up not liking any of the characters. Perhaps too abstract for me, but good writing.

Looking at this review a week later I realize this book still stuck with me even though I don't like to follow plotless narratives. Her imagery and the whole thing I guess was really good in the sense that it was quite memorable.

Luiselli logra una narración que tiene efectos emotivos en uno sin que uno vea los trucos que empleó. Bueno, si los ves, no importa, de todos modos tienen su efecto causando varias emociones que van desde la tristeza, la melancolía, la ansiedad, y la frustración.
Al final se vuelve un empujo que actualiza la tradición latinoamericana a nuevos tiempos.

If you are willing to let the writer guide you through her story, this book will not fail you.
Even if the characters appear to be fragmented. You can still tell which character the writer is talking about. Loved how the narrative becomes almost unrecognizably entangled (with such clarity). Characters blend into each other, a world apart from ours(yet very real), a world conjured up by the writer. It's a joy to read books that break conventions and hold their own.

this was a great follow-up read to "pedro paramo." i really liked the first half, but once the narrative moved to feature owen more directly, i started to lose interest a bit. would love to read more of luiselli's work.

This is a weird novel, and one that is neither easy to follow nor necessarily very enjoyable.

At first the story goes back and forth in time, centering on the female narrator’s current life in Mexico as a writer, wife and mother and he past living in New York City where she worked as a translator. Then around halfway through a third timeline appears with a brand new narrator, a man this time, and it’s unclear if we are reading the words of the author the woman is writing about or if it is her novel. Everyone, however, is extremely unreliable, insincere, and manipulative, and we can’t really believe anything we are reading, which often had me asking why I should even be bothering in the first place.

While I appreciated Luiselli’s attempt to do something as experimental and daring as this novel turns out to be, I also kept wondering if she ever had readers in mind while writing. It’s a very dense, confusing, challenging, and often inscrutable novel, filled with digressions, asides, and a structure that feels more like a puzzle than a narrative.

It’s ultimately an oddity - a weird book that feels far too navel gazing. Just not my cup of tea, despite having heard of Luiselli spoken with raves and awes. I don’t know if this book is indicative of her other works, but I’m not sure it did enough to convince me I should give her writing another try.

Early on this book had one instance of fatphobia so cruel that nothing else that came after it was worth reading to me. I did finish this book but did not like it all and would not recommend it to anyone.