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3.82 AVERAGE
3.82 AVERAGE
This took me a while to finish, but it was worth it. I particularly loved listening to this as opposed to reading it, as the additional voices made it extra engaging. Could be a little difficult for me to follow at times but overall I really enjoyed it.
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Using multiple techniques, filtered through the story of a blended family of four, Luiselli has documented tales of lost children—fictional but based on history—with the focus on those at the Mexico-U.S. border.
Luiselli is a smart, erudite writer. I didn’t recognize most of her literary references, but I do know [a:Cormac McCarthy|4178|Cormac McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1593872299p2/4178.jpg]’s [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439197219l/6288._SY75_.jpg|3355573], as well as the term “rescue distance,” which her first-person adult narrator explains came from a friend. I immediately recognized the phrase as being from [a:Samanta Schweblin|2898936|Samanta Schweblin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1545389695p2/2898936.jpg]’s [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168] and, yes, Luiselli and Schweblin are friends in real life. I’ve read two children’s books that use the David Bowie song “Space Oddity” and can now add this adult book to the list, as the song helps the two step-siblings through a dire situation.
My credulity was strained a bit at the first-person narration of the ten-year-old boy, but that’s ultimately a minor issue. The chapter named “Echo Canyon” (which is mostly the boy’s voice) is a masterful fusion of viewpoints, handing off one lost child’s perspective to another lost child’s via a literal eagle-eye.
Luiselli is a smart, erudite writer. I didn’t recognize most of her literary references, but I do know [a:Cormac McCarthy|4178|Cormac McCarthy|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1593872299p2/4178.jpg]’s [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439197219l/6288._SY75_.jpg|3355573], as well as the term “rescue distance,” which her first-person adult narrator explains came from a friend. I immediately recognized the phrase as being from [a:Samanta Schweblin|2898936|Samanta Schweblin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1545389695p2/2898936.jpg]’s [b:Fever Dream|30763882|Fever Dream|Samanta Schweblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471279721l/30763882._SX50_.jpg|42701168] and, yes, Luiselli and Schweblin are friends in real life. I’ve read two children’s books that use the David Bowie song “Space Oddity” and can now add this adult book to the list, as the song helps the two step-siblings through a dire situation.
My credulity was strained a bit at the first-person narration of the ten-year-old boy, but that’s ultimately a minor issue. The chapter named “Echo Canyon” (which is mostly the boy’s voice) is a masterful fusion of viewpoints, handing off one lost child’s perspective to another lost child’s via a literal eagle-eye.
adventurous
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
The image of an empty frame occurred to me while reading this book, and the more I registered how framing was being used as a metaphor, the more clearly I began to see into Valeria Luiselli's project which had seemed quite blurred in the early pages. By the end of the book, all the stories and histories she managed to insert into that frame had developed themselves into a vivid and powerful image.
Images and metaphors are part of Valeria Luiselli's writing technique though she begins her narrative focusing on the capturing of sound as a way to document our world rather than on written narrative. Somewhere along the way however, there is a shift from the focus on sound to a focus on words, and Luiselli makes the shift with the insertion of short snippets from a fictional book called Elegies for Lost Children which eventually merges with and passes right through the primary story, uniting all the disparate themes in the process.
The setting for the merging is itself a frame: an open sided freight train wagon abandoned in the New Mexico desert. Inside that wagon, three themes come together, fuse and then separate. The first is a nesting eagle, symbol of the disappeared Apache tribe which forms one strand of the main narrative. The eagle's eggs are cooked and eaten by some children who take shelter in her nesting space, driving her away. These invaders are made up of two groups: four children who are the main characters of the Elegies for Lost Children narratives, and who are walking from the south carrying nothing but the hope of eventually finding their relatives in the north; and two step-siblings from the main story, who are walking south carrying the hope of finding the lost children of the Elegies and of somehow reviving their own dying family unit.
Luiselli mentions the origin of the word 'metaphor' at one point, explaining that in Greek it meant being taken somewhere. It also means 'to carry across', and in this book there are examples of both meanings. The children travelling north are taken by train, or rather on the roofs of freight train carriages, all the way across the mountains and valleys of Mexico before having to carry themselves and their slender hopes across the deserts of New Mexico. The children travelling south are taken in the back of their parents' car towards Apacheria until they decide to strike out alone, carrying their own slender hopes to the echoing canyons of the Chiricahua mountains.
But metaphor has a third meaning, or rather consequence: it serves to deepen our understanding of a text. When one of the children in this story attempts to take Polaroid photos only to find that the subject he tries to frame disappears when exposed to light, we understand that this is exactly what the entire book is about: it is about trying to ensure that the subjects it frames do not get deleted when exposed to view. The last of the Apache tribe, buried as 'prisoners of war' in a military compound inside their own territory by the invaders of that same territory, are like a blanked out Polaroid. They have disappeared. They cannot be brought back. Valeria Luiselli seems determined that the plight of the children who are being carried on the roofs of trains from misery and danger in Honduras and Mexico towards misery and danger in the US, will not also be deleted from history.
This documentary novel, full of words, images, sounds and echoes is something new in literary terms, and it works powerfully on our perception, as any good metaphor should. It forces our attention onto a blurred question we might prefer to ignore: who are any of us, wherever we are in the world, to call another human 'alien'?
Images and metaphors are part of Valeria Luiselli's writing technique though she begins her narrative focusing on the capturing of sound as a way to document our world rather than on written narrative. Somewhere along the way however, there is a shift from the focus on sound to a focus on words, and Luiselli makes the shift with the insertion of short snippets from a fictional book called Elegies for Lost Children which eventually merges with and passes right through the primary story, uniting all the disparate themes in the process.
The setting for the merging is itself a frame: an open sided freight train wagon abandoned in the New Mexico desert. Inside that wagon, three themes come together, fuse and then separate. The first is a nesting eagle, symbol of the disappeared Apache tribe which forms one strand of the main narrative. The eagle's eggs are cooked and eaten by some children who take shelter in her nesting space, driving her away. These invaders are made up of two groups: four children who are the main characters of the Elegies for Lost Children narratives, and who are walking from the south carrying nothing but the hope of eventually finding their relatives in the north; and two step-siblings from the main story, who are walking south carrying the hope of finding the lost children of the Elegies and of somehow reviving their own dying family unit.
Luiselli mentions the origin of the word 'metaphor' at one point, explaining that in Greek it meant being taken somewhere. It also means 'to carry across', and in this book there are examples of both meanings. The children travelling north are taken by train, or rather on the roofs of freight train carriages, all the way across the mountains and valleys of Mexico before having to carry themselves and their slender hopes across the deserts of New Mexico. The children travelling south are taken in the back of their parents' car towards Apacheria until they decide to strike out alone, carrying their own slender hopes to the echoing canyons of the Chiricahua mountains.
But metaphor has a third meaning, or rather consequence: it serves to deepen our understanding of a text. When one of the children in this story attempts to take Polaroid photos only to find that the subject he tries to frame disappears when exposed to light, we understand that this is exactly what the entire book is about: it is about trying to ensure that the subjects it frames do not get deleted when exposed to view. The last of the Apache tribe, buried as 'prisoners of war' in a military compound inside their own territory by the invaders of that same territory, are like a blanked out Polaroid. They have disappeared. They cannot be brought back. Valeria Luiselli seems determined that the plight of the children who are being carried on the roofs of trains from misery and danger in Honduras and Mexico towards misery and danger in the US, will not also be deleted from history.
This documentary novel, full of words, images, sounds and echoes is something new in literary terms, and it works powerfully on our perception, as any good metaphor should. It forces our attention onto a blurred question we might prefer to ignore: who are any of us, wherever we are in the world, to call another human 'alien'?
By far the best book I've read so far, this year. But also difficult to put a label on. It surely is an evocative work on the horrible migration problem in the south of the United States, especially with the influx of minors from Mexico. At the same time, it is a travelogue, a classic road novel, with a man and a wife, their children in the backseat, driving from New York to the Southwest, including the shabby motels. And regularly it contains stories on the expulsion and partial extermination of Apache Indians in the Southwest of America, at the end of the 19th century. Finally, it is a philosophical-reflexive book about a marriage in crisis, about the interaction between parents and children, about how children have a different take on the world, and about the ambiguous relation between past, present and future. So that's quite an impressive package.
The ingenuity of Luiselli's writing process is that for each of these themes she mixes narrative genres: internal monologues, dialogues, lists of the contents of their suitcases, reflexive passages and purely descriptive scenes. A very important input is given by excerpts they read from a fictional novel about migrant children being smuggled across the border, 'Elegies of the Lost Children'. The narrative voice is mainly that of the mother, which gives the impression that this is an autobiographical book (like the woman, Luiselli is of Mexican descent).
There are two connecting themes. In the first place, there's the issue of the 'Lost Children', which concerns both migrant children crossing the American border through the desert or riding above train wagons, the children in the backseat of the car (a boy of 10 and a girl of 5), the parents themselves, and by extension also people who seem lost in their own lives. The second theme is that of registering, describing and mapping reality, summarized in the notion of 'documenting'; it is a clever find by Luiselli that her two main characters (the father and the mother) are sound scape artists, constantly recording all kinds of sounds, the father passively (he’s called a documentarist), the mother more intrusive-probing (documentarian). Again, the author constantly mixes up these different approaches and themes. This gives this book a clear postmodern feel, evoking the constantly shifting, elusive character of reality, only to capture in narrating: “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.”
The thoughtful narrative tone, the different layers, the constantly changing form and ultimately also the change of perspective, impose a slow reading pace. Occasionally, Luiselli seems a bit repetitive, or engages in musings that get stuck, but isn't that inherent to the way we all reflect? Formally, the penultimate chapter in particular is a masterful piece of prose, with just one sentence over 26 pages, in the style of Joyce and Woolf. In it, the story of the couple's son and daughter magically entangles with the story of the migrant children from the 'Elegies' novel.
I suspect that I have by no means fathomed all layers of this rich and multiform book, which certainly asks for a rereading. What also really appealed to me is how Luiselli clearly settles scores with a number of 'cult' road novels, such as Kerouac's [b:On the Road|70401|On the Road|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413588576l/70401._SX50_.jpg|1701188], and more implicitly also with Pirsig's [b:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values|629|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)|Robert M. Pirsig|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410136019l/629._SY75_.jpg|175720]. And at the same time the book evoked memories of the reflexive style of Siri Hustvedt and Rebecca Solnit, just to illustrate on what level Luiselli plays. With ‘Lost Children Archive’ she indisputably has written one of the most remarkable novels of the early 21st century.
The ingenuity of Luiselli's writing process is that for each of these themes she mixes narrative genres: internal monologues, dialogues, lists of the contents of their suitcases, reflexive passages and purely descriptive scenes. A very important input is given by excerpts they read from a fictional novel about migrant children being smuggled across the border, 'Elegies of the Lost Children'. The narrative voice is mainly that of the mother, which gives the impression that this is an autobiographical book (like the woman, Luiselli is of Mexican descent).
There are two connecting themes. In the first place, there's the issue of the 'Lost Children', which concerns both migrant children crossing the American border through the desert or riding above train wagons, the children in the backseat of the car (a boy of 10 and a girl of 5), the parents themselves, and by extension also people who seem lost in their own lives. The second theme is that of registering, describing and mapping reality, summarized in the notion of 'documenting'; it is a clever find by Luiselli that her two main characters (the father and the mother) are sound scape artists, constantly recording all kinds of sounds, the father passively (he’s called a documentarist), the mother more intrusive-probing (documentarian). Again, the author constantly mixes up these different approaches and themes. This gives this book a clear postmodern feel, evoking the constantly shifting, elusive character of reality, only to capture in narrating: “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.”
The thoughtful narrative tone, the different layers, the constantly changing form and ultimately also the change of perspective, impose a slow reading pace. Occasionally, Luiselli seems a bit repetitive, or engages in musings that get stuck, but isn't that inherent to the way we all reflect? Formally, the penultimate chapter in particular is a masterful piece of prose, with just one sentence over 26 pages, in the style of Joyce and Woolf. In it, the story of the couple's son and daughter magically entangles with the story of the migrant children from the 'Elegies' novel.
I suspect that I have by no means fathomed all layers of this rich and multiform book, which certainly asks for a rereading. What also really appealed to me is how Luiselli clearly settles scores with a number of 'cult' road novels, such as Kerouac's [b:On the Road|70401|On the Road|Jack Kerouac|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1413588576l/70401._SX50_.jpg|1701188], and more implicitly also with Pirsig's [b:Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values|629|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance An Inquiry Into Values (Phaedrus, #1)|Robert M. Pirsig|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1410136019l/629._SY75_.jpg|175720]. And at the same time the book evoked memories of the reflexive style of Siri Hustvedt and Rebecca Solnit, just to illustrate on what level Luiselli plays. With ‘Lost Children Archive’ she indisputably has written one of the most remarkable novels of the early 21st century.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve written. A heart wrenching story that had me literally crying throughout. A slow contemplative read that I put down often, but picked back up even more.
The writing was not very compelling, but the plot was quite interesting.
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i think children deserve a world when the adults are not so hopeless and useless and it's certainly not this one. God please help them all and forgive us.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A