The Free-Range Bookclub
Bookclubbers without boundaries in Nelson, New Zealand
Lost Children Archive – Valeria Luiselli
READ FOR BOOKCLUB
Chosen by Becks
A family’s road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border.
✚ “Lost Children Archive is not purely about immigrants crossing borders. More, it reflects on the histories of immigrants that have been lost by society’s refusal to embrace cultural uniqueness.
Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.
“To highlight her point, Luiselli cleverly constructs her book with a narrative that itself sometimes captures events and sometimes allows them to fade into meaninglessness.
“The unnamed parents capture sounds for a living and are headed cross country on a road trip with their two children (referred to as boy and girl), each working a different soundscape project.
“The sounds captured, the waning silences, the awkward interactions amongst the family members and their varying memories of the same experience all demonstrate how difficult it is to tell a story from one person’s perspective or with only one mode of language. Ultimately the narrative structure suggests an inventoried collection of fragments and experiences is the only way to accurately represent a moment in time .
“To showcase this, the story changes narrators several times. Ma recalls the journey in an intellectual, emotional and overthinking way; boy challenges her assertions, recalling the same events in a logical, realist manner; whereas girl remembers the entire trip as a series of sounds. The father, true to his self-absorbed characterisation, does not contribute to the narrative.
“However, Luiselli wants us to know that no matter how many fragments the mother collects, no matter how many ways in which she tries to tell the stories, it is the political systems that will win: immigrants will be treated with disdain, their stories, histories and beliefs will not be valued nor kept. Historical narratives must be in the hands of many, she intones, not just of a few select powers.
The book also offers a juxtaposition between creating new histories and relying on existing texts, showing how the past and present are constantly intersecting and can provide a muddling effect to the remembered truth of history.
Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape?
✚ “I have both read and listened to this book, and as a story about sounds, both offer a unique perspective. I loved this multi-dimensionality, especially as the book is about how accurate histories should be captured in many different formats. Every voice is deserving in the documentation of history and the author makes this evident.
“I particularly loved girl’s retelling of their trip as a series of echoes in the Audible book. It is so eerie, and stimulates a roller coaster of emotion, like reliving the entire book again in condensed format.
“The novel’s language is slick and considered. I found myself often pausing to either marvel over beautiful sentences or to consider challenges to conventional ideas and constructs. I absolutely loved Lost Children Archive and have thought about it a lot since first reading it.” – Rachel
✚ “I can’t say I really enjoyed the book all that much.This was primarily due to the mother’s narrative which was too pretentious and overwrought for me. I much preferred the son’s logical narration style but by the time this was introduced, it was unable to recover my interest in the story.
“My view of the novel vastly improved following the bookclub research, when the reason for all of the different perspectives became apparent. I did enjoy the educational aspect in regards to learning about the Mexican people’s awful journeys and the risks they take to cross the US border. The portrayal of the horrible consequences to immigrants’ lives but also to their histories was extremely moving.” – Jo
✚ “Lost Children Archive was my runner up book of 2020, for a mixed bag of reasons, and not because it was a ‘perfect’ novel for me. In fact, there were a few things I didn’t really like about it. Truth be told the weightiness of the mother’s narration was at times too much, too contrived. I wanted reprieve from constant metaphors and analogies and double meanings. And I didn’t like the perfect plot, which felt to me like one driven by the need for metaphors, analogies, and double meanings.
“But at the same time, I was blown away by how cleverly and beautifully the book was written. The lost children touched me, moved me. The lost stories, blankness, emptiness and the sense of touching a void, were all feelings I experienced whilst reading this book. The deep, deep sadness and loss, the pain of parent separated from child, or the death of a child, a lost child. The refreshing simplicity of the boys narrative, in contrast with the mothers? That was genius. A beautiful book”. – Sonya
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Published 2019
Knopf Publishing Group
385 pages
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