Hardcover, 383 pages
Published April 4, 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf.
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained–or lost in the desert along the way.
A gorgeous book, I hadn't annotated a book so much in a while. It's thoughtful, imaginative and highly political.
I have a low tolerance for authors who write in the voice of child narrators, so that impaired my enjoyment of this book, as did the fact that the first 1/3 went much too slowly. That being said, I think the author did a great job of executing on her goal, which was to draw parallels between the vulnerability of children travelling alone, and to help us empathize with the terrifying journey of immigrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone. She also raised interesting questions about what it means to record factual information, and the way that adding information to our historical archive illuminates what gets left out. I still felt the book was a slog to get through, and I kept having to force myself to return to it, hence the 2-star rating.
At the end of [a:Valeria Luiselli|4405738|Valeria Luiselli|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419533843p2/4405738.jpg]'s [b:Lost Children Archive|40245130|Lost Children Archive|Valeria Luiselli|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547386427l/40245130.SY75.jpg|62525285] is a list of works cited that made me feel as dumb as I am because I haven't read Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Augusto Monterroso, Galway Kinnell, Juan Rulfo, Rilke, and Jerzy Andrzejewski. It made me wonder if I was missing a lot of the book's message, like that in the nearly twenty page single sentence near the end. Despite this, I found it wonderfully written and highly topical and overall well worth reading.
In the slow float of midmorning light, the children play the Apache game with their father. The cottage is at the crest of a hill in a high valley that undulates down toward the main road, invisible to us. No houses can be seen, just farmland and grassland, sprinkled here and there with wildflowers we do not know the names of. …
At the end of [a:Valeria Luiselli|4405738|Valeria Luiselli|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1419533843p2/4405738.jpg]'s [b:Lost Children Archive|40245130|Lost Children Archive|Valeria Luiselli|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547386427l/40245130.SY75.jpg|62525285] is a list of works cited that made me feel as dumb as I am because I haven't read Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Augusto Monterroso, Galway Kinnell, Juan Rulfo, Rilke, and Jerzy Andrzejewski. It made me wonder if I was missing a lot of the book's message, like that in the nearly twenty page single sentence near the end. Despite this, I found it wonderfully written and highly topical and overall well worth reading.
In the slow float of midmorning light, the children play the Apache game with their father. The cottage is at the crest of a hill in a high valley that undulates down toward the main road, invisible to us. No houses can be seen, just farmland and grassland, sprinkled here and there with wildflowers we do not know the names of. They are white and violet, and I make out a few orange patches. Farther away in the distance, a confederacy of cows grazes, looking quietly conspiratorial.
Thoughtful and haunting - this wasn't the novel I thought I was going to read when I first picked it up. It is a road trip story but also a story about history and memory and names.
Of the many interesting aspects there are to discuss in this novel, one that continually came back to me was the way Luiselli used echoes as a consistent metaphor. Echoes permeate every difficult corner of this novel and managed to ground me during certain puzzling sections.
Highly recommended.
In the summer of 2015 the arrival of Central American children to the U.S. who were seeking asylum surged. It was the summer that Valeria Luiselli and her family were driving down to southern border, hearing the news that there were–at that moment – about 60,000 children alone at the border, seeking asylum and waiting permission to reunite with their families, and hoping not to be deported back. When she returned to New York, where she lives, Valeria Luiselli started working as a volunteer interviewer and interpreter for children seeking to asylum in the U.S. in the court of immigration.
Lost Children Archive is an extraordinary novel of frustration, anger and sadness. It comes after Luiselli’s 2017 non-fiction book on immigration, “Tell me How It Ends” which is based on her work as a volunteer interpreter and talks about this immigration crisis. The Lost Children Archive is labelled as a …
In the summer of 2015 the arrival of Central American children to the U.S. who were seeking asylum surged. It was the summer that Valeria Luiselli and her family were driving down to southern border, hearing the news that there were–at that moment – about 60,000 children alone at the border, seeking asylum and waiting permission to reunite with their families, and hoping not to be deported back. When she returned to New York, where she lives, Valeria Luiselli started working as a volunteer interviewer and interpreter for children seeking to asylum in the U.S. in the court of immigration.
Lost Children Archive is an extraordinary novel of frustration, anger and sadness. It comes after Luiselli’s 2017 non-fiction book on immigration, “Tell me How It Ends” which is based on her work as a volunteer interpreter and talks about this immigration crisis. The Lost Children Archive is labelled as a novel but it is a book that takes many forms. It is a road trip across America of a family that is slowly disintegrates. At the same time it is the story of the journey of seven children from Central America aboard a train travelling to the U.S.–Mexico border and into hell. The children are the heroes of the story but they are also the victims of a brutal, inhuman system.
The Lost Children Archive is also an archive, a record of our times. Luiselli documents the political violence in the U.S. but she does not try to convince us about any particular political viewpoints, she rather explores the questions behind certain viewpoints and the ethics around documenting political crises and people’s suffering. In Lost Children Archive the shape of the story is the story.
