Beginning Middle End

In Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End, characters adrift in a world of personal and global fragmentation turn to classical mythology for a functional blueprint to navigate their reality. Following a painful divorce, the mother and her daughter embark on a nomadic journey through Europe, searching for a new story to live within. Luiselli presents ancient texts and myths as dynamic, recurring patterns that provide a framework for understanding contemporary chaos. By consciously mapping their lives onto the stories of figures like Proteus and the women of Troy, the mother and daughter transform their disjointed experiences into a coherent, meaningful quest, arguing that myth provides an essential structure for processing grief and inventing a future.

The characters repeatedly use classical literature to bridge the thousands of years between ancient catastrophes and their own present-day struggles. While reading Seneca’s Trojan Women, they learn of Queen Hecuba’s call for the captive women to mourn their burned city. They immediately connect this ancient scene of collective female rage to a modern one, watching a video of Las Tesis, a Chilean feminist collective protesting femicide. The daughter notes the striking parallel, seeing the same raw, public grief enacted across millennia. This act of drawing a direct line between the Bronze Age and the 21st century demonstrates that myth, for them, is a living script that articulates timeless emotional and political realities, offering a language for their own unspoken feelings of loss and injustice.