Place-Making in the Solitude of the City: Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos

Abstract

In Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (2011) the city operates as a canvas for the writing of a story that cuts across time and space. At its heart is a hunt in which a nameless writer in contemporary Mexico City collides regularly with a barely-known Mexican poet in the Harlem Renaissance of 1920s and 1930s New York City, Gilberto Owen. Her interest in Owen quickly devolves into an obsession, in which the two begin to lead parallel lives in the city, encountering one another in real and imagined landscapes. The chase in this novel is one that is deeply literary and that contemplates the role of exile and travel so crucial to the writing of Latin America. Luiselli’s novel makes places out of the spaces of the city in its multiple representations in order to ruminate on broader literary questions in contemporary Latin America.