Lost Children Archive

I think I wanted to like this book more than I actually did, and I think in part my choice to read this as an audiobook played a part. The reader for the audiobook has a rather flat tone, and I found it to be much less engaging as an experience than I'd hoped. I found this novel to have much that was interesting and challenging as a whole, but I think it would have worked better for me in print.

This felt overly referential and pretentious. The kids didn't feel realistic and the parents weren't fleshed out. I feel like we got information about their actions but not who they are, if that makes sense. The native narrative and immigration conversation were jumbled and felt like plot devices.

Slows down at the end, but the writing is absolutely gorgeous!

It's a clichéd warning to photographers: take your eye away from the lens, lest you forget to see the view at all. What if your job is documenting sounds? Do you risk losing the ability to listen?

This book is an exercise in discomfort from start to finish, on so many levels. Unease sets in on page one as the narrator repeatedly refers to her children as “the girl” and “the boy”. No names. Detached, clinical, and OMFG can she ever describe a scene, what beautiful sentences, but what an eerie distance. Much of the book is what I can only describe as hazy: despite the exquisite depictions of scene, the human element was what I came to think of, for the second quarter of the book, as “the opposite of connection” – and was I ever jarred when the boy, at the beginning of the second half, describes their time in the car as “it felt like we were the opposite of being together.” It was insightful to read this during the 2020 pandemic because despite the physical isolation I've never felt as suffocatingly lonely as those four people in that car.

Uncomfortable: the woman's self-absorption, complete inability to relate to her husband or children. Uncomfortable: the persistent thread of migrant children, whose suffering we sometimes think about but always briefly and never deeply. (Has the woman's obsession with them atrophied her ability to relate to nearby flesh-and-blood humans? Is Luiselli warning us not to focus exclusively on that telephoto lens?) Uncomfortable: the silences and the ways they're sometimes filled. Very uncomfortable: the second half.

Luiselli writes beautifully, with a vocabulary that had me shivering with delight at moments. We realize that the narrator's dissociation is deliberate and not the author's own personality. And we are drawn into the story, absorbed, because it's so gracefully woven.

I've gone on way too long already but have to add one more note. Uncomfortable: Lord of the Flies. Yeah, we all hate it. One of the threads in the book relates to it. I felt very, very fortunate to have read, the very day before starting Lost Children Archive, this article about six Tongan children who survived a year and a half on a deserted island. I think it underscored Luiselli's intention.

Discomfort is good for us. It helps us grow. Push past it. Read this.

Hum. This one will be hard to review. It's gorgeously written, a little over-written in my opinion. I found myself losing patience with it often as I just could not get invested in the story. Here we have two very independent, strong-willed people who built a family out of convenience and now we, the readers, get to watch it all fall apart on a road trip. In addition to that there were sections I literally felt I was sitting in a lecture hall in a class I was forced to take.
That said, the book absolutely came alive for me when the boy took over as narrator and the last quarter of the book is a whirlwind of breathless action. Two stories merge in the desert and it is incredible to experience. Honestly, the last quarter of the book made me so glad I read this.
Is it life altering? Maybe. I'll have to wait until some time passes before I see what I absorbed and what I will carry with me.
So, it's strange. While it is clearly one of the best novels I have read this year, I didn't enjoy it. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to patrons.
I want to note that I did a mix of audio book and physical copy on this one, and I'm glad I did. There are pictures, maps and lists in the book book that need to be seen, I feel.

This is a hard book to review because it's so complex. The main story is of a husband and wife, who each bring a child to their marriage, taking a road trip from New York City to the desert Southwest so that they can each pursue documentary projects that they are passionately interested in. Even before they set out on the road trip the future of the marriage is in question, but the couple's relationship disintegrates further as they travel.

Woven through the story are themes of erasure and loss: the Apache Indian tribes who were the last tribes to surrender to the US government and who the husband is obsessed with documenting. The wife is preoccupied with unaccompanied children who attempt to enter the United States for asylum and who are unceremoniously deported back to their home countries–after enduring unbelievable hardship to get here.

One of the best things about this book is its careful attention to detail. A gesture, a commonplace phrase, the way something looks and what it suggests–all are subject to examination and consideration in the narrative. When I started reading Lost Children Archive this drove me crazy because it made the book drag. Eventually I settled down to the style, and accepted that everything was going to be subjected to the scrutiny of a poet.

There is a book inside this book, too. Elegies For Lost Children is a book that the wife brings with her on the journey and that her children sometimes read from. It's a story of a caravan of unaccompanied children traveling through hardships to reach a place of safety. It is full of literary references, from T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Latin American authors that I was not familiar with.

The main characters, the husband, wife, and two children, do not have names for the first half of the book. When they finally do acquire names, they are the names that they give each other after the husband tells a story about how Apache children were given names. The whole book is like this: constructed to place you in a mental state of discomfort, disorientation, uncertainty, to mimic what people in the book are experiencing. But there is also a feeling of distance, because the book also has a complicated intellectual underpinning that not everyone can have access to. There is a debate about whether the father or the mother are correct in calling themselves a documentarian vs. a documentarist, and I wasn't sure how seriously to take this. Was it a joke about intellectual jargon or a reference to a genuine professional disagreement? The weaknesses of the book are along this line.

It took me more than 50 pages to decide I would stick it out and finish the book, and ultimately I'm glad I did. It was challenging to read, but once I adjusted my expectations for the pacing of the story I enjoyed it.

Lost Children Archive is inventive, timely, and ambitious. Valeria Luiselli has pulled off quite a feat, merging a relevant topic with various media forms and using language in a very ingenious way. This is a book that could do for immigrant children what The Grapes of Wrath did for migrant workers (though the execution probably leaves out too much of the average reader). I recognize all the great and wonderful components of this novel, but I didn't enjoy it all that much. And that always makes for a difficult review.

The biggest barrier for me was the narrative. I was distanced from these characters, not because their experiences were vastly different from my own, but because I never understood who they were; I was never fully invited into their thoughts. Who was this unnamed woman? We're told about her endeavors, about her passion for others—but the woman we get on the page seems rather detached from everything that happens. We're told about her volatile marriage, but the marriage on page is boring at worst. We're led to believe the son is incredibly mature and intelligent—and this is actually shown in the narrative—but when the plot demands the son doing something really, really stupid, suddenly his common sense completely evaporates. Unfortunately, none of these characters are developed in a way to make sense of their actions (or inaction) in the story.

Certainly, my lackluster opinion of this novel reflects my own bias—I like character-driven stories. This novel fails in regards to creating interesting, multi-dimensional characters who possess a notable arc. Lost Children Archive definitely excels when it comes to language and delivers a satisfactory plot—readers who are turned on by language and plot will find more appeal than I did. In the end, I admire this book for its intellectual and artistic acumen, but I just don't think it fully delivered.

Lovely and chewable, way smarter than I am in terms of literary allusions but still enjoyable as a story. I have some extra books to look up now as well.

minor quibble I was hoping the photos would be more integrated with the text

I listened to this one on audiobook, and this seemed like a very appropriate way read it because so much is about audio. And the recording uses a variety of voices and some inventiveness in its technique that all seemed appropriate. Though I do want to look back to see how some of it was handled in the text. I enjoyed it and, though the subject matter is moving, the novel itself didn't move me much.

This review can also be found on my blog.

I can easily see a lot of people hating this book. In fact, I can see myself hating this book. It's dense and it's work to get through. This is yet another one I would almost definitely not have finished if I wasn't reading it for the Women's Prize. The writing style isn't my thing and it's immediate from the start that layout of the book itself is atypical, for lack of a better word. It's a “family story” and a “road trip book,” both of which I also tend to stay away from. There are plenty of reasons why I shouldn't have enjoyed this book, but somehow I did.

The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there's not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day the other can suddenly become a stranger.

There are so many layers to this, and I know I didn't fully understand all of it. The main character and her husband are sound archivists, which right away makes for a bit of an intriguing tone. It explains the unusual formatting and lets our narrator examine things in a light we may not be accustomed to. It also helps to incorporate the underlying theme of the novel: illegal immigration in the United States.

No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: why did they flee their homes?

The narrator and her husband meet while working on a project to record all of the languages being spoken in New York City. The narrator herself was born in Mexico and becomes obsessed with the children crossing the border, hoping to join their family on the other side. Once the language project is complete, she decides to make her next project about giving voices to these lost children. Meanwhile, her husband's next project is on the other side of history: he has become deeply obsessed with the history of the Apache tribes of Native Americans.

[...] reading others' words, inhabiting their minds for a while, has always been an entry point to my own thoughts.

I found myself becoming deeply emotionally connected to the narrator throughout the first half of the book, until the focus shifts to the son. From there, I became more enthralled with the plot itself. I found the switch interesting; I went from somber introspection to a more dreamlike reading experience. I enjoyed both parts of the book and felt like they really balanced each other out.

Hard to explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an unbeautified portrait of their lives. But perhaps also easy to explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before they go back to wherever they'll sleep that night.

There are so many deep themes to this that I wish I could discuss in detail, but just can't grasp strongly enough to wrangle into a coherent analysis. I really wish I had read this in a lit class in college, I know I would have gotten so much more out of it. Regardless, I'll probably be reading whatever pieces I can find on this, so if you happen to see something interesting please send it my way!

Once he even recorded our voices talking in the backseat of the car, and then played them for Ma when they thought we were both sleeping and not listening. 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?

All in all, while this was a challenging reading experience for me, I really felt it was worth it. Luiselli succeeded in making me think deeply while consuming her work, and I hope to return to it in the future – perhaps with a better context to place it in. I recommend picking this up if you're looking for some slower moving literary fiction to make your brain work.