A Literary Walk in the City: Reading Valeria Luiselli’s Sidewalks

Abstract

The paper attempts a close reading of Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli. Since Luiselli replicated
walking/bicycling in Mexico City in terms of stylistics, structure and tone of the essays, I consider it
significant to view Sidewalks as part of the literature of walking. A branch of travel literature, the literature
of walking, was an emerging genre in which the narrator is depicted as walking on a place and the physical
act of walking with thinking to generate and arrange creative ideas into a coherent whole. Walking and
thinking were as old as the Greek Peripatetics or even older. The paper reads Sidewalks as the product of
thinking while walking. Walking/bicycling provided Luiselli with a felt point of reference to interrogate
abstraction in the modern world. Our failure to engage our senses with the real and the concrete place
deprived us of an experiential way of living. The paper pays close attention to metaphors and images as
they appeared to the consciousness of the walking/bicycling narrator, which are closely interwoven with
Mexico's literal and literary background.