Point of View

The novel is written from the third person point of view. This narrative perspective allows the author to inhabit the lives and experiences of her large network of characters. In each chapter, the narrator moves inside a new setting, adopting the character's feelings, opinions, and most intimate desires and longings. Even though Emilia, Enzo, Alina, Grigor, Marvin, and the other characters' lives are so vastly different from one another's, the narrative voice connects them. The narrator has the ability to access and convey each of these individual's deepest emotional and psychological concerns to the reader, even when the characters are intentionally withholding their experiences from others. In the first "Oaxaca" chapter, for example, the narrator tells the reader that Alina has been wanting, "for a few years now...a new place, or body, or world, whatever it would take for her to change course" (15). Though...