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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Valeria Luiselli has an extraordinary and unique voice she uses to move us and fill us with questions. Her books are always creative and carry a necessary sadness. One of my favorite authors.
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
most beautiful writing style and such powerful messages in ideas of archival and which stories have the privilege of being told and which get ‘lost’. a maximalist and meta undertaking which i’m still in AWE of
“When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.” -- Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli
Two mismatched, unnamed sound archivists (one a 'documentarian' the other a 'documentarist') and their ten-year-old and five-year-old children embark on a road trip so the mother can help a migrant reunite with her children on the U.S.-Mexican border, and the father can create a soundscape of the 'Apacheria' of the nineteenth-century Chiricahua Apaches. In the trunk of the car are boxes of books and documents ranging from Kerouac's On the Road, Homer's Odyssey, Robert Frank's The Americans and Ezra Pound's Cantos and a red-bound volume called Elegies for Lost Children, by a fictional Italian writer named Ella Camposanto. Half-way through the book an event occurs that dramatically shifts the tone and style of the novel in a way that is intense and both beautiful and frightening.
Lost Children Archives is carefully structured, intricate, layered, filled with references related to a variety other material and features central characters who are portrayed unsympathetically. The book gets personal bonus points for name checking Sally Mann, Anne Carson and R. Murray Schafer (and others), using polaroids as a narrative device linked directly to Camposanto's elegies. It's classic "Man Booker" material: thoughtful, creative, intellectual, and equally a book that I found frustrating through of my inability to connect with the main characters (or, to be honest, my dislike for the adults).
Two mismatched, unnamed sound archivists (one a 'documentarian' the other a 'documentarist') and their ten-year-old and five-year-old children embark on a road trip so the mother can help a migrant reunite with her children on the U.S.-Mexican border, and the father can create a soundscape of the 'Apacheria' of the nineteenth-century Chiricahua Apaches. In the trunk of the car are boxes of books and documents ranging from Kerouac's On the Road, Homer's Odyssey, Robert Frank's The Americans and Ezra Pound's Cantos and a red-bound volume called Elegies for Lost Children, by a fictional Italian writer named Ella Camposanto. Half-way through the book an event occurs that dramatically shifts the tone and style of the novel in a way that is intense and both beautiful and frightening.
Lost Children Archives is carefully structured, intricate, layered, filled with references related to a variety other material and features central characters who are portrayed unsympathetically. The book gets personal bonus points for name checking Sally Mann, Anne Carson and R. Murray Schafer (and others), using polaroids as a narrative device linked directly to Camposanto's elegies. It's classic "Man Booker" material: thoughtful, creative, intellectual, and equally a book that I found frustrating through of my inability to connect with the main characters (or, to be honest, my dislike for the adults).
Enjoyable, not too long, better than most in its category.
While I marvel at her virtuosity — the intellect, education, and sheer literary skill on display — I found the novel tedious, and almost put it away. I was often reminded of Don DeLillo, by her vocal tone and by her characters’ hyper-analytic perspectives. And, like him, she sometimes allows concept to overwhelm character. Still a remarkable accomplishment, though, if not very entertaining.
4.5 This is Literature, big ‘L’ (check out the ‘Works Cited’ at the back of the book). Serious, covering so many interwoven heavy subjects. At first organized around archive boxes (which require their own mental unpacking on the reader’s part). The intersection of the voices and sounds (and ‘echoes’) in New York, subsequently traveling across the southern US, and the unraveling that begins to happen, which is oddly an echoing itself. And wow did the last half grab me with the switch to the son’s voice, and then the melding with the stories of the immigrant lost children. Perhaps the son and daughter were encountering echoes? Of the lost children? Of native peoples? Of a family life together? And the immigrant lost children can never really be recovered. And of course the son and daughter are found. Appreciated the small bits of images. Heavy and serious book. To me, grouped with my readings in previous years of /Lucky Boy/ and (non-fict) /The Devil’s Highway/. Quotes below
p 58 “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility’” (quoted from book /Art in the Light of Conscience/)
p73 “ I feel a dull, deep nausea –a physical reaction to the boy’s story and his voice, but also to the way that news coverage exploits sadness and desperation to give us its representation: tragedy.”
P75 “Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.” [Much like the son and daughter in the novel]
P85 “I have never asked a bookseller for a recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. ...”
P96 “....it doesn’t seem right to turn those children, their lives, into material for media consumption. Why? What for? So that others can listen to them and feel —pity? Feel—rage? And then do what? No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning. Everyone continues with their normal lives, no matter the severity of the news they hear, unless the severity concerns weather. “
P103 “No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, televisions series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises.”
P156 “ I admire those people: women who leave men, men who leave women, people who are able to detect the moment when the life they once chose to live has come to an end, despite possible future plans....”
P203 “ And it was strange to listen to our own voices around us, like we were there but also not there. I felt like we’d disappeared, thought, what if we are not actually sitting back here but only being remembered by them?” [is that what happens to refugee lost children ?]
P216 “... And maybe to fill in the silence, Ma told us that Mexicans used to call white Americans hueros, which could either mean “empty” or mean “with no color” (now they still call them güeros). And Mexican Indians, like Ma’s grandmother and her ancestors, used to called white American borrados, which meant “erased people.” I listened to her and wondered who were actually more borrados, more erased, the Apaches that Pa was always talking about but that we couldn’t see anywhere, or the Mexicans, or the white-eyes, and what it really meant to be borrado, and who erased who from where.”
p 58 “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility’” (quoted from book /Art in the Light of Conscience/)
p73 “ I feel a dull, deep nausea –a physical reaction to the boy’s story and his voice, but also to the way that news coverage exploits sadness and desperation to give us its representation: tragedy.”
P75 “Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.” [Much like the son and daughter in the novel]
P85 “I have never asked a bookseller for a recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. ...”
P96 “....it doesn’t seem right to turn those children, their lives, into material for media consumption. Why? What for? So that others can listen to them and feel —pity? Feel—rage? And then do what? No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning. Everyone continues with their normal lives, no matter the severity of the news they hear, unless the severity concerns weather. “
P103 “No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, televisions series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises.”
P156 “ I admire those people: women who leave men, men who leave women, people who are able to detect the moment when the life they once chose to live has come to an end, despite possible future plans....”
P203 “ And it was strange to listen to our own voices around us, like we were there but also not there. I felt like we’d disappeared, thought, what if we are not actually sitting back here but only being remembered by them?” [is that what happens to refugee lost children ?]
P216 “... And maybe to fill in the silence, Ma told us that Mexicans used to call white Americans hueros, which could either mean “empty” or mean “with no color” (now they still call them güeros). And Mexican Indians, like Ma’s grandmother and her ancestors, used to called white American borrados, which meant “erased people.” I listened to her and wondered who were actually more borrados, more erased, the Apaches that Pa was always talking about but that we couldn’t see anywhere, or the Mexicans, or the white-eyes, and what it really meant to be borrado, and who erased who from where.”
This was thoughtful and lovely and sometimes confusing. Long almost dreamlike prose. I can't tell whether this is about the refugee crisis, a dissolving marriage, or the differences between how adults and children see the world. Or maybe it's all three.
This complex novel is difficult to sum up in a short review. With a main character who calls herself a "documentarian" and her husband who calls himself a "documentarist" this novel raises interesting questions about what it means to document a person or an event, and what details should be included in such a document or archive. The archive boxes at the center of the story layer onto these questions, as do the projects the protagonist and her husband are working on: she, to search for two unaccompanied children who crossed the southern border into the US and then were lost and to bring attention to the issue of migrant children who are lost once they cross the border; he, to document echoes of Geronimo, the last Apache holdout. In both cases, the subjects of their project face erasure by a dominant white culture and one question is how they can be seen and/or remembered while respecting their humanity.
The story is told through a road trip from New York to Arizona taken by the protagonist, her husband, and their children, a boy and a girl. The first part of the novel is from the protagonist's point of view, and the second part from the boy's point of view. The shifting points of view, the descriptions of the archive boxes, and the collection of Polaroid pictures taken by the boy through the course of their travels, as well as the stories of unaccompanied children traveling by train through Mexico to the US that are interspersed throughout, help the reader experience issues of immigration through individual experiences instead of in the abstract. The novel offers no solutions, merely questions that are likely to change the way many white American readers think about immigration, while also reflecting on relationships and the power held by those who write the history books.
The story is told through a road trip from New York to Arizona taken by the protagonist, her husband, and their children, a boy and a girl. The first part of the novel is from the protagonist's point of view, and the second part from the boy's point of view. The shifting points of view, the descriptions of the archive boxes, and the collection of Polaroid pictures taken by the boy through the course of their travels, as well as the stories of unaccompanied children traveling by train through Mexico to the US that are interspersed throughout, help the reader experience issues of immigration through individual experiences instead of in the abstract. The novel offers no solutions, merely questions that are likely to change the way many white American readers think about immigration, while also reflecting on relationships and the power held by those who write the history books.