Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mattdube 's review for:
Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
When I first heard about this, a story exploring the plight of children at the Southern border that mixed fiction and non-fiction and less orthodox materials, and that it would be written by Luiselli, I was very excited. And on paper, all that is awesome, as is the idea that the story is organized around these boxes of archival materials, that it (at least in theory) includes audio recordings (here as transcripts) and all these literary texts, including a novel in translation about post-apocalyptic kids on trains, I was like, bring it on.
But in practice, this doesn't work, however ambitious and cool Luiselli's plans; they exceed her abilities as a writer, and the result is often dull and sometimes just falls flat-- the sections narrated by the ten year old not only don't sound like a ten year old, they occasionally seem to fatally misunderstand what the genre Luiselli is writing in needs (think of the early runaway scene told with the excitement that young Swift Feather feels, where dread only creeps in later). And then, to echo Beckett (or Woolf, as Luiselli says) with a long unparagraphed section also from the POV of the ten year old? The writing didn't sparkle enough to make it work, and the result was honestly hard to read.
A disappointing case of great plans that weren't successfully executed.
But in practice, this doesn't work, however ambitious and cool Luiselli's plans; they exceed her abilities as a writer, and the result is often dull and sometimes just falls flat-- the sections narrated by the ten year old not only don't sound like a ten year old, they occasionally seem to fatally misunderstand what the genre Luiselli is writing in needs (think of the early runaway scene told with the excitement that young Swift Feather feels, where dread only creeps in later). And then, to echo Beckett (or Woolf, as Luiselli says) with a long unparagraphed section also from the POV of the ten year old? The writing didn't sparkle enough to make it work, and the result was honestly hard to read.
A disappointing case of great plans that weren't successfully executed.