In his 1967 book The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode attributes the shape of most fictions to a human discomfort with living ‘in the middest’. Just as Christian framework understands humanity to exist in the middle space between genesis and apocalypse, so a more secular logic imposes a beginning and an end on smaller-scale narratives in order to make sense of the middle – the place we
actually live. 

In Valeria Luiselli’s elegant new novel, symbolic beginnings abound. A mother and daughter – one half of a family recently split by divorce – land in Sicily, their arrival timed to coincide with a change of wind and a lunar eclipse. The mother, who narrates most of the novel, stays up at night with a fresh writing project (which, we later learn in a short section narrated by the daughter, develops into the book that we are reading). Life and fiction are linked pursuits; a new start in one means a new start in the other. She is determined to forge ‘a way into a new form of motherhood’ alongside ‘a way back into writing’, and artificially crafts her life as she would a character’s, obsessed with ‘finding a beginning’.

It couldn’t be a neater play on the traditional narrative arc promised by the novel’s title. Gradually, though, the three-part plot structure set out by Aristotle in his Poetics, in which he relegates the middle to a liminal ‘kind of half-existence’, seems a less and less apt framework for Luiselli’s