A slim volume but worth the price of admission. Luiselli's writing is at once syntactically idiosyncratic, pithy and lean.The introduction calls these essays, but to my mind they are more properly termed literary meditations or extended aphorisms. I'm not sure exactly how to capture what Luiselli's up to here. She plays with ideas. She toys with narrative. She philosophizes lightly. She inks stylish gauzy speculations. I read much of this in the last minutes of wakefulness, some sinking into my

This is the kind of book that I like: a book which isn't really about anything but also seems to be about everything, a little like the kind of Rebecca Solnit memoir/anti-memoir thing going on.It's about travel, home, maps, graves and lots of other fascinating things. It is perhaps a little slight, and more like a journal or a scrapbook rather than a proper book book... but it's still great and smart and full of wonderful things and I'd love to read more of Luiselli's work.

I first read Valeria Luiselli before I was 'very online'. Reading her after all those years, brought me memories of the contemplative solitude I lived in. One of my favourite essays is about Luiselli half-heartedly trying to learn Portuguese. The bookstore she visits never seems to have a Portuguese dictionary and instead she buys Brazilian books of poetry. She wonders about the etymology of "saudade" and the related history of Portuguese, eventually meandering into lines about Aristotle and Fre...

When I was a Senior studying Sociology, a professor from Japan shared with our class that Americans do not write essays the same way the rest of the world writes essays. In Japan, it was considered rude to write a thesis statement, the point of the paper so frankly laid out insinuated that the reader would not be able to come to their own conclusion. I found this interesting because so many of my teachers had spent days of instructional time belaboring the thesis statement. This book--translated...

Valeria Luiselli is a thinker and her thinking takes her to a cemetery in Venice searching for Joesph Brodsky's tomb, it has her wandering that city's streets so late she is locked out of the only room left for her to lay her head, a convent and sees her regularly seeking wisdom and listening to the advice of a doorman about how one best comes to know oneself. "If there still exists a gaze blessed with liminal wisdom, it is the gaze of night-shift doormen. They are the only true free-thinkers -

This is what all the cool book nerds are going to be reading before long.

I'm giving this little book 5 stars because it succeeded in challenging and stimulating me intellectually. This is a short collection of personal essays contemplating issues such as identity, belonging, language, and spaces. Luiselli makes the reader think; she doesn't offer us any concrete answers but rather opens the text for questioning.Although it's a book that can be read in one afternoon, I took my time with it and read it over two weeks, each time one or two essays so as to allow me time

Perfection is not the reason we enjoy the books we love, and what connects us to these books is more mysterious than what is written within them, as what resonates most with us in the books we love is almost always between the words, around them, outside of their inky delineations. For we bring more to the books we love than those books bring to us, and to steal an image from this book, they are like the windows of our homes at night reflecting back our own interiors, the purview they open upon

When we have only a partial knowledge of a language, the imagination fills in the sense of the word, a phase or a paragraph (p.42)This was a lot of fun, and very quotable, it is a literary book , but above all a digression around nothing. Her digression digresses from attempting to find Brodsky's grave in Venice to considering Mexico city - what shape is it, what fruit is it, does it have a centre, it's missing lakes, it's vacant plots, from where she digresses us into learning Portuguese and

The difference between flying in an airplane, walking, and riding a bike is the same as that between looking through a telescope, a microscope, and a movie camera. Each allows for a particular way of seeing. From an airplane, the world is a distant representation of itself. On two legs, we are condemned to a plethora of microscopic detail. But the person suspended over two wheels, a meter above the ground, can see things as if through the lens of a movie camera: he can linger on minutiae and cho...

This essay collection is something to linger over with a glass of wine. The writing is beautiful; it forces you to slow down and savor each word, each idea. Philosophical and at times satirical, this collection called to mind works by Jean Baudrillard. Reading these, it doesn’t really feel like it’s about anything, but at the same time her work encompasses everything: space, life, death, poetry, transportation, identity, Venice. My favorite essay concerned maps and the restlessness of travel, th...

flâneuristic little essays about wandering around the gray area between home and grave ~ searching for surprising notches in the city, peering into windows, living with a solitude of thoughts in motion ~ a prose deeply longing for other books, other authors and philosophers ~ luiselli was 22 years-old when she wrote this, smoking cigarettes and reading brodsky in doorways and cemeteries, quoting wittgenstein and walter benjamin, while conjuring up her own aphoristic realizations about writing, w...

I'll be honest, this book felt like a chore for me. Vaguely bound together as a travel journal, "False Papers" is a rambling essayistic account of different cities, like Mexico City and Venice, and some of the things that set them apart from other places. It's also a book about language, the impossibility of translation and identity as a concept. Luiselli is clearly well-read and casually tosses around names like Brodsky, Zambra and Barthes as she sets off on a journey which reminds the reader o...

Also my mum liked this, like, a lot.

"Remembering, according to etymologists, is 'bringing back to the heart'. The heart, however, is merely an absentminded organ that pumps blood. But rereading is not like remembering. It's more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of rewriting our past through the twice underscored words of others."..From the essay "Return Ticket", in SIDEWALKS by Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney.While I've enjoyed Luiselli's fiction, this essay collection was my favor...

These are pages that will follow you as you walk, drive, sit on the couch, stair at the ceiling from bed at 3AM. And you will want to return to them. You will put this book on your "to reread" shelf. You might even write a journal entry or two in an attempt to mimic Luiselli's observations. You will be glad you read the book.

Luiselli is one of my favorite writers now.

Sidewalks (though I prefer its Spanish title, Papeles Falsos, which roughly translates to "False Papers") is, above all, a thoughtful book. Luiselli’s substantial intelligence manifests itself in her careful choice of language, the formal decisions she makes, and the way each of these essays builds into the next, the careful and complex and beautifully-constructed dialog that emerges between these ten brief pieces. The result is a collection that builds toward a powerful and complex conclusion,

"...literature could be like a great house, a territory without frontiers that offers shelter to those of us who don't know how to inhabit any particular place..."If you enjoyed Letters to a Young Poet, you'd undoubtedly be charmed by this essay collection. Luiselli might be a bit more melancholic compared to Rilke, but both had an understanding sympathy towards the world and a lightness in their passages that can only come deep connections with their inner-selves. Sidewalks is a delicious and

oh my god. this is a collection of musings about a lot of things: literature, travel, languages, cities. the writing is sharp and concise without much adornment yet it never bored me. her sentences and thoughts demanded my attention and i was more than willing to give it to them! i'm sure part of the credit goes to the translator as well.my favorite thing about this is the sense of place. luiselli wrote about mexico city with so much love and familiarity and exasperation - the only way to write