Looking back at what I wrote at the time, Lost Children Archive didn't fully wow me - but it's stayed with me and its effect has grown over time in the way some books do. Beginning, Middle, End is in conversation with Lost Children Archive in any number of ways - the similarities between its mother and daughter (unnamed until the end) and those in Luiselli's previous novel, the sectioning of its narrative and interpolation of photographs and other artifacts, shared thematic concerns both personal and societal (family relationships under pressure, forced migrations), children's perspectives and voices interwoven in interesting and structurally significant ways.
I think that, without either of us knowing it then, her way of being in the world passed on to me an intuition of life as something greater, an awareness of a big mystery in the very heart of life, to which we do not have access by which sometimes, not very often, quietly announces itself in us, allows us to see it, glimpse it, feel it, be thankful that we were able to catch it, even if fleetingly. And that intuition is the only thing that feels, today, so many years later, like the sustenance of everything else, of the will to imagine things, care for things, worry about their vanishing. I cannot say what it is that she gave me, but everything I write is an attempt to find it again.
Indeed it's through the 12 year old daughter's intervention in the final of the three prose sections - each named after one of the winds that blows through Sicily, mythologically, metaphorically, literally - that the significance of the mother's early recitation of Proteus' metamorphoses is revealed, along with the deeper way in which the daughter has literally shaped the entire narrative (beginning, middle, end) that's come before: "a swordfish, a camera, a rainstorm, a jellyfish, a donkey, a toothbrush, fire, a boat, a book". And indeed, while the whole novel is beguiling and interesting, it's in that same, final section that it feels like Beginning, Middle, End is visited by that sense of internal detonations rippling to bring a novel as a whole to a satisfying shape.
What happens in the middle is that if life is at all like an arch, and one happens to be standing somewhere near the apex around the age of forty, what one sees on one side is one's children walking into life, and then, on the other side, one's parents on their way out. The middle, then, is a difficult vantage point, where life and death meet, where arriving and leaving come together, where the beginning and the end become visibly and irremediably linked.
In Luiselli's words during an interview: "It was as if Proteus’ metamorphoses allowed for the novel to be a fluid, shapeshifting book, but at the same time one that finally had a coherent internal logic: it became a road novel, a mother-daughter story, a family saga, a piece of climate fiction, a rewriting of myths from a less heavily-patriarchal perspective. But more than anything, for me, it became a novel against the feeling of the end of times, and a novel about how fiction is a way to come to terms with change and constant transformation."
