The Man Without Weight: A Ghost in the Labyrinth

As a young, keen, and conscious Mexican writer, Valeria Luiseli, in her first novel, The Man Without Weight (Shanghai People's Publishing House), has demonstrated sophisticated creative skills, especially the fascinating ability to travel back and forth between dense structures, straightforward writing, and mysterious halos.

In this autobiographical work, Louiselli tells three stories: a female novelist creates a work reminiscent of her youth in a mild and trivial family life; Many years ago, living in New York, she was obsessed with publishing the poems of the Mexican poet Silver Owen, and did not hesitate to use deceptive means to do so; Many years ago, the poet Owen, whose marriage failed, lived in Philadelphia, and he gradually lost his sight in the torture of cataracts.

In this experimental work, Louiselli naturally and resolutely completely shreds the continuous time and space of the development of the story, and the repeated shifting narrative perspective creates a natural sense of dreaming. The passages about family life are the closest to a shallow awakening in this dream, with Zhongzhong ("no big middle boy") and his unexpectedly arriving sister occupying the mother's day and workbench. "I" wrote: "A novel requires a long breath. Novelists want that. "I have a daughter who is still a baby and a middle in the middle. They wouldn't let me breathe. Everything I write is — and must be — short-breathing. There is very little air. In fact, "The Man Without Weight" is a short-breathing work, the favor for fine short sentences shapes the unique flavor of the whole novel, the rapidly changing perspective is dizzying, and the continuous and coherent novel content is always repeatedly interrupted by the strange questions in the middle and middle.

However, unlike many more "realistic" authors, Luiselli does not complain too much about and render the squeeze of family life on creation—although some light silhouettes can reveal this behemoth, instead, her restrained and precise writing hints at the subtle interaction between daily life and writing. For example, "I" declare that his work is "a quiet novel so as not to wake up the children", which on the one hand separates the moment of writing from the toiling, fragmented and innocent life, forming a bitter sense of distance, on the other hand, it is also a conscious understanding of the youth years in the pen, which lays the tone of emotion before more stories unfold.

Zhongzhong once asked "I," "What is your book about?" and he got the answer— "It's a book about ghosts." "But these ghosts may not be dead, they will only disappear and appear in the crowd from time to time." The story of the publication of Silver Owen's poetry collection is the textual essence of The Man Without Weight, a clever, turbulent and devious recollection. As a young translator living alone in New York, "I" am surrounded by booksellers peddling pirated old books, bar singers who live in limbo, reticent philosophy students, and conservative literary editors, whose faces are clear and invisible, and "I" often have different versions of their memories of their acquaintance and separation.

In the longest passage of the entire novel, "I" stumbled upon a letter from the Mexican poet Owen, and under its guidance, "I" came to the apartment where Owen used to live, "When I saw the dead little tree on Owen's roof, I felt compelled to take it home and take care of it." "I" forged a fatalistic connection with Owen. However, owen," who lacked fame, did not arouse the interest of editors, and in order to publish his poetry collection, I forged Zukovsky's manuscripts translating Owen with the fame of the former, which gave the latter the opportunity to be discovered—of course, as in similar stories in reality, "we" falsified crudely, but too delicately in detail. Under Luiselli's narration, almost from the day the epistles were discovered, owen's ghost hovered beside "I," who cared for his dead plants, read his works, collected his portraits, and even used his name as a pseudonym. These dense and delicate narratives tie the bonds across time and space, and the attachment and pursuit of "Owen" is like a specular operation, going deep into the soul of "I" and occasionally seeing something more profound.

The perspective of the Euphrates tells one of the most mysterious stories in The Man Without Weight. A blind man named Homer sees Owen as a ghost (like the "I" of New York), and the poet, tormented by illness, is gradually losing his sight. Along with the sickness and the failed marriage came the three cats in the apartment—of course, in Luiseli's cunning account, we cannot be sure whether they were living animals or ghostly symbols—Owen entertained them with wine, as if to entertain his remaining number of deaths, and together with Homer made an interesting point about death: "Of course there are many deaths in life. Most people don't feel it. A person dies every moment. Perhaps under this theory, The Ghost of Louiselli has a more lively life.

The alternating jumps of the novel's three stories construct enough complex literary spaces, alternating between the voices of different people and creating echoes again and again. The fragmented passages are like a mirror that has been cut open, reflecting countless complex illusions. In the same story, "The Man Without Weight" often shows a loop on the timeline. Of course, when reading, rather than reconstructing the ins and outs of the story, you may be able to get a more complete picture as the author's consciousness floats freely. At the same time, Luiseli deliberately placed similar passages next to each other, such as the plot of "my" husband's move to Philadelphia to work and Owen's move to Philadelphia. We can almost believe that she deliberately slows down the text, so that the reader feels more unspeakable light and electricity between the friction of truth, deception, hallucination and defense.

As a young author with a backed backed by Latin American literary traditions and a broader literary resource, Luiseli consciously or unconsciously shows her wonderful sense of mission for the previous generation of writers in "The Man Without Weight". Just as "I" was obsessed with Owen's discovery, the names of many Latin American writers are dotted in different corners of the novel, but similar to the original situation of Owen's poetry collection, the literary editors in the novel lack trust and patience for these Latin American writers to be discovered. Louiselli also specially designed an interesting situation: Owen was invited by his ex-wife to participate in a poetry workshop, and after speaking with an "international Bogotá accent", she introduced her ex-husband with great interest after giving a speech on "poetry, the dissolution of identity, the identity of the expatriate, forget what Creole things there is"—in the playful expression of identity, there is also a cultural irony that cannot be ignored.

The Man Without Weight offers us a brilliant metaphor for the work itself. Louiselli writes, "A compact, porous novel. Like a baby's heart. "It's a work of literature, identity, and ghosts, and in this novel we can read quotes and responses to Pound's famous poem "At the Subway Station" many times. For Luiseli, the characters who wander between the real and the imaginary are the faces that emerge from the crowd, they are reality, memories, and ghosts, and in the labyrinth of texts, they create enough enchanting landscapes.