BEGINNING MIDDLE END

A mother-daughter trip to Sicily becomes a journey into history, myth, and human nature.

Luiselli’s fourth novel is mostly narrated by Ella Camposanto, a divorced writer, who’s joined by her 12-year-old daughter, Manuela, on a trip to the island while she works on a novel. Precociously, Manuela asks if mom’s next book could have a straightforward beginning-middle-end structure. Given how the (very Luiselli-esque) writer’s novels tend to be pastiches of poetry, photography, history, and other assorted material, it seems a tall order. But this book largely, cleverly obliges: The two undertake a journey to return a small mosaic of the god Proteus to the ancient villa where Ella’s grandmother may have pilfered it; meanwhile, Mount Etna is erupting, threatening wildfires. But a clear quest and a clear danger doesn’t lock Luiselli into a stock structure, and the storytelling weaves in ancient Greek and Roman texts to explore how fluid and changeable we are. (Proteus, representing ever shifting seas, is a key figure; so too is Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pliny the Elder’s writings, concerned with weather patterns and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.) The drama in the novel is relatively minor—Ella’s relationship with her new lover, a concert pianist, is frosty, and Manuela is stung by a jellyfish. Still, the story feels like it has the force of centuries behind it, from Manuela’s obsession with tides, myth, and history to glimpses of the Middle Eastern refugees who’ve arrived at the island (to the scorn of many locals). Luiselli, a Mexican American writer who’s focused on borderlands immigration in previous fiction and nonfiction, has made displacement her great theme. The change of scenery doesn’t shift her focus; rather, it intensifies her argument that global migration is a prompt to reconsider our identities and relationships.

An offbeat migration story as piercing and artful as any in Luiselli’s oeuvre.