Delightful wit ... I take some not insignificant degree of comfort in the fact that an artist of Luiselli’s remarkable thoughtfulness and intellect is around to document whatever will come, especially whatever will end.
Intriguing and accomplished ... Sustains a vital idea: storytellers who sustain and create collaborative knowledge defend themselves from and sometimes vanquish the violence and danger that necessitate flight.
Original, enjoyable and thoughtful, a mesmerizing take on the current climate catastrophe and its parallels in classical literature and ancient mythology ... Ends with a series of photographs and the audiobook features a soundscape made in Sicily. These are nice touches, but perhaps unnecessary. Beginning Middle End feels complete without them.
Luiselli has long been intrigued by literary boredom. Beginning Middle End, like all of her novels, goes without what its protagonist calls the 'corset of plot.' By no means does it lack drama—see: impending lover, maybe-sick mother; because this is Sicily, there’s also a looming volcano—but traditional story does not drive the novel forward ... By rejecting the myth of beginning again and the idea that endings are inherently meaningful, Luiselli highlights the fascination of the middle. It’s a bold approach to life, more than literature. In the traditional arc of a book, of course, the ending can come only once. A beginning, meanwhile, sets a story’s tone and stakes. It tells the audience whom and what to care about, and creates, ideally, a sense of expectation and intrigue. Beginnings, in short, exist to make you want to read middles. In life, this can be tougher to accept; it’s hard to be in the middle, twisting between life and death. Still, as my grandfather used to say, it beats the alternative.
With photographs and old postcards enriching this rhapsodic tale of beauty and terror, Luiselli contemplates questions of home, inheritance, time, mythology, metamorphosis, injustice, our impact on nature.
...the novel has trouble gathering momentum – or perhaps isn’t interested in doing so. Paley’s narrator calls plot 'the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised.' Luiselli’s seems to feel the same way, breaking her narrative into discrete little segments ... The larger contradiction within Luiselli’s work is that although the subjects it returns to – the role and status of the mother, migration, the climate crisis – are universal and urgent, it is becoming ever more inward-looking. The most dramatic journey Beginning Middle End describes is whether it can succeed in becoming the book we hold in our hands. In a knowing moment, the narrator’s daughter studies the mosaic of Proteus – a shapeshifter, just like this novel – 'as if she were looking into a mirror or a pool of water, like a little Narcissus peering at himself.' Since finishing the book, it’s the image that has persisted most strongly in my memory.
This alone would make for an engaging premise but much of the novel’s ingenuity and intrigue lies in its subtext and interrogation of themes such as memory, migration and the mechanics of writing ... As is her predilection, Luiselli writes mainly in fragmentary prose, which creates an immediacy, a feeling of being inside someone’s mind as she skips from topic to topic ... an affecting novel for anyone midway through their life or seeking their own new beginning.
After five previous books of fiction and essays, Beginning Middle End is the first novel I have read by Luiselli that reads as truly familiar—an extension more so than a reinvention of her past work. For this reason, it also feels like it might be Luiselli’s most radical career-turn ... Luiselli has found considerable comfort blending her novel and essay writing into a form that feels entirely her own. Which is not to say that all readers will be on board: If there is a fair critique to be leveled at Luiselli’s latest effort, it would probably concern that while Beginning Middle End frequently invokes and reflects on the logic of plot, its own plot is relatively thin ... for what a novel titled Beginning Middle End may ironically lack in robust plot, it makes up for in sheer intellectual adventurousness.
Arresting and layered ... Luiselli makes reference to ancient Greek and Roman mythology, which adds depth to her profound portrait of the relationship between mother and daughter as they navigate the new shape of their family and try to understand each other. It’s a masterpiece.
