Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli review – a mother and daughter’s odyssey

Published 29 July 2026 · india

This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My

This journey of discovery from the US to Sicily tackles urgent themes, but is increasingly inward-looking In Grace Paley’s short story A Conversation With My Father, a request is made of the Paley-like narrator. “I would like you to write a simple story just once more,” her father says, “the kind Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov … Just recognisable people and then write down what happened to them next.” Her attempt, and its failure to impress him, is the action that powers the story.

Valeria Luiselli’s fourth novel is propelled by a similar request, the daughter of the Luiselli-like narrator asking: “Will you finally write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” It’s a problem Luiselli has addressed before. In her 2017 book-length essay about undocumented migrant children, Tell Me How It Ends, she writes that the difficulty in telling their story “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end”.

Beginning Middle End charts the narrator’s efforts to corral life into a narrative. The father in Paley’s story would be similarly unimpressed. After a “slow, entangled” divorce, the narrator, a Mexican living in the United States, embarks on a European book tour with her 12-year-old daughter. She has a coil removed in Munich; her daughter loses a tooth in Prague; near Amsterdam they watch children learning to swim with their shoes on in case of floods.

When summer comes, the pair fly to Catania in Sicily. The narrator’s grandmother grew up nearby. They stay in the apartment of a pianist who’s away on tour, with whom the narrator had a “brief and feverish encounter” the previous year. Continue reading...

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