BEGINNING MIDDLE END, Luiselli speaks infrequently but always eloquently and elegantly

BEGINNING MIDDLE END
VALERIA LUISELLI
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, preorder now for delivery on 28 July 2026

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.

This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo—cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up—her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.

Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?

Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

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My Review: How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?

As a mission statement you don't get a lot clearer than that one, the simple reflection on how hard it is to create a story afresh. The women in this story are unnamed, because naming is a deterministic act, a story's half over when you're named because identity isn't fluid after that. A label like mother or daughter is subject to refinement...whose mother? daughter of whom?...but a name stops the question, collapses the possibility in the narrative by making in the identity "mother" or "daughter" concrete to that one person.

Sicily's ancient land is littered with bits and fragments of many identities that seemed immovable in other times. Ruins of homes, temples, fields, volcanoes, none in their original condition and most only tentatively identified and that with modern superimposed names that we use in place of older names from other stories that built, were built from, other identities. What better place to tell the story of telling the story of building anew identities that were never anything except conditional.

Volcanic violent emotions are everywhere in this story of re/invention. The women are scraped raw and still bleeding without bandages or protection for their wounds as the mother's book tour takes them to this ancient place of ancestral memory for them both. With them is a piece of Classical foreknowledge...a head of Proteus...that belongs in this restless shaky earth because he came from here. And how fitting: coming home in the hands of people reduced to relationship, deprived of the story they shared by loss, amputation, severing of a former castmate; here Proteus and continue a fragment of the story this fragment of a created piece of an idea of his physical form, this godly figment of millions of minds back on eruptive, earthquakey home soil (not even the sea he was an assistant god of in those fevered imaginings). It is the story of this story in a hand-holdable bit of broken-off antique knick-knack.

Mother and daughter move through this not-really native ancestral world, mother doing the mother thing by wondering if her daughter is really going to be the woman she sees coming into focus. Is the Proteus a stolen fragment of patrimony, or a piece of the homeland carted to a frightening new world by a feisty, scared girl shifted by her needs into a simulacrum of male freedom? Does this mean there is a hard-edged channel for the fast-flooding rage of the world in her daughter, or is the idea of belonging uniquely to a time and a place moving her feelings into Earthly action on Proteus' behalf?

Stories have no beginning middle end. We impose those ideas on the world. Time...that thing we are slaves to, are shackled on the side of being dragged along always trying not to be crushed under the wheels of the misunderstood, mischaracterized "juggernaut"...has no inherent direction, the equations don't define beginning middle end. It isn't the gods, then, that created time. That was us.

So here are two women out of place and out of their time, defining new beginnings middles ends with Author Luiselli sweeping the temple steps for their ascent. It is masterful work. It deserves to define your time as beginning middle end.

THE INVENTION OF SICILY: A Mediterranean Odyssey, a title that truly says every last thing about the book within

THE INVENTION OF SICILY: A Mediterranean Odyssey
JAMIE MACKAY
Verso Books
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A fascinating cultural history of this most magical of islands.

Sicily has always acted as a gateway between Europe and the rest of the world. Fought over by Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spanish and French for thousands of years, Sicily became a unique melting pot where diverse traditions merged, producing a unique heritage and singular culture.

In this fascinating account of the island from the earliest times to the present day, author and journalist Jamie Mackay leads us through this most elusive of places. From its pivotal position in the development of Greek and Roman mythology, and the beautiful remnants of both the Arab and Norman invasions, through to the rise of the bandits and the Cosa Nostra, The Invention of Sicily charts the captivating culture and history of Sicily.

Mackay weaves together the political and social development of the island with its fascinating cultural heritage, discussing how great works including Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard and its film adaptation by Visconti, and the novels of Leonardo Sciascia, among many others, have both been shaped by Sicily’s past, and continue to shape it in the present.

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My Review: Sicily's thousands of years of documented history can't be done justice in a shortish survey book. It can, however, do the reader who loves Italy and longs for a Sicilian vacation a very big solid by explaining a bit about why Sicily is not like the rest of Italy. There is a significant prejudice against Sicilians, and Southerners more generally, in Italy as a whole...no country is without internecine conflict...but the reasons go back a very long way.

Starting from its origins as a Greek colony, Sicily has been fought over by outsiders for millennia. Different Greek city-states, Phoenicians, Normans on Crusade taking it from Arabs...if you want to understand how Sicilian culture gave rise to the ultimate Family, the Mafia, insulated from the rest of the world, look no further than its long history of being the prize in other peoples' wars.

Italy the current nation-state did not even exist until 1860. After that Unification, the country pretty much ignored the agrarian island. Riots and rebellions, official neglect and church corruption, all led to the rise of the chaotic present in which the Cosa Nostra/Mafia/organized crime has acted as a kind of de facto government substitute. The present-day refugee crises have had a powerful impact on the island's rickety infrastructure and led Sicilians to harden their opinion that the rest of Italy is not interested in helping them cope with this problem not of their own making...again.

The book is written very ably, and has a deft touch on the topics it does cover. It does not pretend to authoritative stature as a major history. It is clear about its purpose as a survey of a long, long history of a much-put-upon place. It will give Italophiles bad wanderlust, and spark curiosity in most history buffs. Any place that has Archaic Greek, Byzantine, Golden Age Muslim, Byzantine, medieval Norman, Spanish, and Catalan ruins and buildings still in use is a place very much worth getting to know. Don't go in expecting a deep dive into any one period's history, and this book will surprise, delight, inform, and astonish you.

But seriously...no images? *tsk*