Lost Children Archive
Book - 2019
A novel about a family of four, on the cusp of fracture, who take a trip across America--a story told through varying points of view, and including archival documents and photographs.
Publisher:
New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Edition:
First edition.
ISBN:
9780525436461
0525436464
9780525520610
0525520619
0525436464
9780525520610
0525520619
Characteristics:
383 pages : illustrations (some color), photographs ; 24cm.


Opinion
From Library Staff
The award-winning author of Tell Me How It Ends traces a profoundly human family summer road trip across America that is shaped by historical and modern displacement tragedies as well as a growing rift between the two parents.
From the critics

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Add a CommentListening to this novel was a bumpy ride for me. Loved it, hated it. Loved it, hated it. Firstly, yes- it is beautifully written, well planned, exquisitely layered (heartbreaking and infuriating stories within stories), deserving of the praise, etc., etc. But man… the parents have some qualities I apparently have a real hard time swallowing. They are too... “cultured,” I guess? Enough with the name dropping of writers and musicians and dancers and artists and whoever else. Sheesh. And their treatment of their kids... so distant and selfish so much of the time. I realize this was by design, part of the Story and all, but it was enough that I almost quit it. And then I thought there may be some clarity (and redemption?) when the son narrates, admitting his parents’ shortcomings at one point. It wasn’t long after that when I got hung up on how he seemed MUCH too mature for a 10-year-old. ANYWAYS… lots of good things and lots of bad… Glad I finished, relieved I’m done.
A blended family — a man plus his 10-year-old son and woman plus her 5-year-old daughter — set out on a cross-country road trip: he, to record the sounds of “Apacheria,” the Apache Indians’ historical land, and she to record the sounds of undocumented immigrant children being deported. They are documentarians/documentarists. Along the way, they also record the sounds of their own journey: him sharing his thoughts with the children about the futile honor and courage of Geronimo and Cochise; she expressing her sorrow and rage about children being rounded up and flown back into the danger they are so desperate to escape. Sounds take on an almost mystical quality; she talks about “ghost sounds” — sounds they hear and record that are also sounds that the Apaches heard when the land was theirs. This book was a joy to read because Luiselli writes beautiful passages (except for the one multi-page sentence near the end; there was no reason nor excuse for that). It is surprising that she writes so insightfully about being a parent, because she looks too young to have much experience in that department. It’s when she switches to the voice of the boy that reality must be suspended more than I am able to suspend it. His words and thoughts sound nothing like those of a 10-year-old boy. It’s okay, though. I liked this book for the writing more than for the story.
In this mishmash of a novel, it is as if the author could not decide what she was doing. Is this auto fiction? A post-modern exercise? Why did she change the narrator to an unconvincing child? Why place such emphasis on her marriage breakup but provide no insight on the reasons? The focus on the thousands of children fleeing unbearable conditions in Central America is lost by a self absorbed author in a too long novel.
After an extremely promising start, Luiselli surrenders all her hard work to an unconvincing 10-year-old narrator and relies on the interjection of chapters of a fictional other work to present a nightmarish vision of the dilemma of border crossers. By the end, it’s flat, distant and ragged, with unfinished seams and characters who become increasingly contrived.
I thought this book was beautiful, poetic and sometimes magical. I think I read a different book than some of these commenters.
Modernist fiction and political activism have been brought together to produce Lost Children Archive. Luiselli is the daughter of a Mexican ambassador. When the southern border crisis grew around 2014 or so, Luiselli admirably volunteered her time and efforts to help the desperate refugees trying to reach the United States navigate the US legal system. One isn't surprised to read that this novel began as a scathing essay on how refugees are treated before being put on hold and later re-worked as a modernist intertextual manuscript, in dialogue with Pound, Eliot, Woolf, and others.
In the first half of this novel of two parts, the story is told from the point of view of a mother traveling by car from NYC to the border area with her soon-to-be ex-husband and their two children. She is working on a story about the children who travel to the border alone and disappear in their attempt, wiped from the map, except sometimes as a red X marking where bodies are found in the desert. She questions her project, mirroring Luiselli herself no doubt:
"Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn't art for art's sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else's suffering?"
In part two of the story, the narration shifts to her ten year old son, who takes along his five year old sister as they run away from their parents to find some "lost children" and make their way to a location of importance to the Apache tribe, whose genocidal destruction is the focus of the husband. This section culminates in a 20 page long sentence in which his viewpoint alternates with that of a small group of lost refugee children who seem to physically emerge from a book he and the mother have been reading in a whirlwind of, what, neo-magical realism?
Overall for me it is a novel that is intellectual, produces lots to discuss, and is moderately enjoyable as a work of fiction.
Feb-March 2020
Barack Obama recommendation
I don't know what to say but perhaps the times we live in have allowed us to expect this sorry mess to be described as a novel. I'll carry on trying but it seems to be painting by numbers mixed with some bizarre notion of profundity. I like nothing more than a mixed media approach to the novel but this is reportage and navel gazing and an ill-formed oddity. Very disappointed.
This book was submitted for consideration for the 2019 Southwest Books of the Year list in the Fiction category!