Faces in the Crowd

• Book ID: 126217995
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 600 KB
• Category: Standards

✦ Synopsis

In the heart of Mexico City, a woman, trapped in a house and a marriage she can neither fully inhabit nor abandon, thinks about her past. She has decided to write a novel about her days at a publishing house in New York; about the strangers who became lovers and the poets and ghosts who once lived in her neighbourhood. In particular, one of the obsessions of her youth — Gilberto Owen — an obscure Mexican poet of the 1920s, a marginal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a busker on Manhattan's subway platforms, a friend and an enemy of Federico Garca Lorca.
As she writes, Gilberto Owen comes to life on the page; a solitary, faceless man living on the edges of Harlem's writing and drinking circles at the beginning of the Great Depression, haunted by the ghostly image of a woman travelling on the New York subway. Mutually distorting mirrors, their two lives connect across the decades between them; forming a single elegy of love and loss.

✦ Subjects

Современная проза