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varsha_ravi 's review for:
Lost Children Archive
by Valeria Luiselli
‘If I close my eyes, disquieting visions and thoughts churn inside my eye sockets and spill over into my mind. I keep my eyes open and try to imagine the eyes of my sleeping tribe. The boy’s eyes are hazel brown, usually dreamy and soft, but can suddenly ignite with joy or rage and blaze, like the meteoric eyes of souls too large and fierce to go gentle - “gentle into that good night.” The girl’s eyes are black and enormous. Come tears, and a red ring appears instantly around their edges. They are completely transparent in their sudden mood shifts. I think when I was a child, my eyes were like hers. My adult eyes more constant, unyielding and more ambivalent in their small shifts. My husband’s eyes are gray, slanted and often troubled. When he drives, he looks into the line of the highway like he’s reading a difficult book, and furrows his brows. He has the same look in his eyes when he’s recording. I don’t know what my husband sees when he studies my eyes; he doesn’t look very often these days.’
Though the characters remain largely anonymous in Luiselli’s moving, profound work-of-art that is Lost Children Archive, there is such a sense of perceived closeness, a kind of intimacy that you hold with this family. It’s a beautifully constructed, masterfully layered exploration of imaginative empathy. The reader is both held at a distance and brought intimately close and the experience lies in how you choose to define where that line lies. The mother and father, a sound documentarian and sound documentarist, along with a child each bring from a previous relationship form the nucleus of this story. As they traverse the landscape of the United States making their way from New York to the southwest border of Arizona, the independent research of both the mother and father becomes more pronounced. The mother, focussing on the child migrant crisis in the south border, and the father tracing the final whereabouts of the Apaches and the land they once called home. The stories they narrate, the literature they are influenced by, the music they listen to, the conversations they have weave a rich tapestry of nuanced storytelling, and you can’t help but feel you’re in this road trip with this family. As much as it’s a story of grand themes of migration and displacement, it’s also the story of a failing marriage and the subtle repercussions that take shape in the children’s own actions, catapulting them into an adventure of their own. All these different voices and narrative arcs, echo and merge to create a staggeringly ambitious soundscape of what it means to be human in inhumane times. It’s haunting, deeply melancholic, evocative and profoundly moving. A true work of genius.
Though the characters remain largely anonymous in Luiselli’s moving, profound work-of-art that is Lost Children Archive, there is such a sense of perceived closeness, a kind of intimacy that you hold with this family. It’s a beautifully constructed, masterfully layered exploration of imaginative empathy. The reader is both held at a distance and brought intimately close and the experience lies in how you choose to define where that line lies. The mother and father, a sound documentarian and sound documentarist, along with a child each bring from a previous relationship form the nucleus of this story. As they traverse the landscape of the United States making their way from New York to the southwest border of Arizona, the independent research of both the mother and father becomes more pronounced. The mother, focussing on the child migrant crisis in the south border, and the father tracing the final whereabouts of the Apaches and the land they once called home. The stories they narrate, the literature they are influenced by, the music they listen to, the conversations they have weave a rich tapestry of nuanced storytelling, and you can’t help but feel you’re in this road trip with this family. As much as it’s a story of grand themes of migration and displacement, it’s also the story of a failing marriage and the subtle repercussions that take shape in the children’s own actions, catapulting them into an adventure of their own. All these different voices and narrative arcs, echo and merge to create a staggeringly ambitious soundscape of what it means to be human in inhumane times. It’s haunting, deeply melancholic, evocative and profoundly moving. A true work of genius.