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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONThis novel is not one but two narratives. The first narrative is the story of a family travelling to the Apacheria, where the father hopes to record and document sounds from the location that Geronimo and the Apaches lived. The mother also works in acoustics and the two of them met working together documenting sounds and recording a soundscape of New York City. However, their relationship is dying, and this trip could be the final nail in the coff...
Idea overshadows execution. Still, there are moments when this book soars.
Winner of the Dublin Literary Award 2021Nominated for the Booker Prize 2019 Unfortunately, this novel illustrates the difference between well-intentioned and well executed: Luiselli writes about the plight of migrants trying to cross the border between Mexico and the US, especially children making this dangerous passage through the desert in hopes of being re-united with family members who work in the States. So this author has a message, and an important one, and there is nothing wrong with sel...
Lost Children Archive is a 'love it or hate it' kind of book - some readers will admire its allusiveness; others will be turned off by its aloofness. Some will probably just think that it is overstuffed and trying to do too much.For those expecting a novel tackling the child migrant crisis, be warned: that’s the backdrop, not the main event. In fact it’s about a middle-class marriage dissolving in slow motion on a family road trip, and the effect this has on the couple’s children.The wife (u
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019Update 29/4/19 - Probably the most glaring omission from the Women's Prize shortlistThis is my new favourite book of the year so far - an original, daring and timely story inspired by the experiences of desperate children crossing the desert border between Mexico and New Mexico and Arizona, and the Apache warriors who made their last stand in the desert.The framing story describes a road trip the narrator, her h...
The image of an empty frame occurred to me while reading this book, and the more I registered how framing was being used as a metaphor, the more clearly I began to see into Valeria Luiselli's project which had seemed quite blurred in the early pages. By the end of the book, all the stories and histories she managed to insert into that frame had developed themselves into a vivid and powerful image.Images and metaphors are part of Valeria Luiselli's writing technique though she begins her narrativ...
This might be the best book I've read all year. It's about refugees, lost children, memory, family, and what can truly be captured about a place or moment in time. Personal connections abound - sound capture, archival boxes, Steven Feld, marriage, so much that goes deep and I'll be thinking about for some time. Here I will place some random quotations, for now."Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.""The thing about living with someone is that even though you see the...
I think the books that fall into the 'admired it, didn't like it' camp are some of the hardest to review, and that's exactly how I felt about Lost Children Archive. I think this is objectively a very good book. Valeria Luiselli sets out to do something incredibly ambitious, mixing media forms and offering a wealth of commentary on migration and displacement. But all that said, it left me feeling rather uninspired.This book and its main narrator are unapologetically aloof, and I think that was th...
I find the easiest way of evaluating the merit of a novel is simply to ask myself if I could have written it. If the answer is yes I'm left with the conviction it can't have been very good. Well, there's no way I could have written this. It's miles too good! A husband and wife, drifting apart, take their two children on a working roadtrip from New York to the Mexico border. The husband is researching the last days of the Apache tribe before they were moved onto a reservation and the mother is co...
Finally rewarded for its brilliance as the winner of the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award having already won the 2020 Folio Prize but having been previously discarded at the shortlist stage for the Booker and Women's Prize.---------------------------------------------------------------------Now longlisted for the 2019 Booker, interestingly alongside one of the other Women’s prize books that I reference in my original review. As i had already read 10 of the longlist (with two unavailable)...
Lost Children Archive is a difficult novel to review; I've been turning it over in my head for more than three weeks now, trying to figure out how to sum up the reading experience. For me, it's first and foremost a road-trip novel; when I think of it now, I think about the family on the road: the places they stayed, the people they interacted with, the sights they saw and the things that happened to them. The road trip is initially described by the unnamed female narrator, wife to the driver of
Winner of the 2021 Dublin International Literary AwardWhenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them 'the lost children'. I suppose the word 'refugee' is more difficult to remember. And even if the term 'lost' is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as 'the lost children'. And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to childhood. If they hadn’t gotten caught, they probably wou...
“Lost Children Archive” must have one of the most unusual structures for a novel that I’ve read in a long time. It seems natural that Valeria Luiselli’s first novel written in English would chiefly concern the plight of immigrant children as her extended essay “Tell Me How It Ends” so powerfully laid out this harrowing dilemma. Since politicians often turn immigration into an abstract political debate, Luiselli has a tremendous ability for highlighting and reminding us how this is above all a hu...
* 4.5 *In all honesty I was not looking forward to picking up the Lost Children Archive , as I thought it was going to be "difficult" and obtuse. To begin with it does appear to be overly filled with references to other novels, riffs on contemporary dance and digressions into such things as space suit design and sound mixology. Typically, I would struggle with this writing style but gradually Luiselli won me over. I became fascinated with this westward journey, the family dynamics and the larger...
This is a fascinating novel - not what I expected but how could I expect something so unlike anything else I've read? I listened with absorbed attention to the voices of this family traveling cross country - the parents, one a documentarian and the other a documentarist, and their 2 kids, by separate marriages (unrelated by blood). It is tangentially about refugees and lost children crossing the border but mostly it is about a family, their love for each other and their inability to stay togethe...
By far the best book I've read so far, this year. But also difficult to put a label on. It surely is an evocative work on the horrible migration problem in the south of the United States, especially with the influx of minors from Mexico. At the same time, it is a travelogue, a classic road novel, with a man and a wife, their children in the backseat, driving from New York to the Southwest, including the shabby motels. And regularly it contains stories on the expulsion and partial extermination o...
Marvelous, if not plagued by familiar MFA-grad maladyExcellently written, thought-provoking [3.8*] tale about deported (and lost) children. The narrative goes between a 30-something woman and her 10-year-old stepson as they and her husband and her 5-year-old daughter (husband's stepdaughter) travel from NY to AZ. The novel is interspersed with stories about deported children and the Apache tribe of native Americans, and is, unsurprisingly, peppered with scathing commentary on past and current U....
Deported, Disappeared, Detained, Removed, Missing, LostValeria Luiselli's novel is so much more than the poignant reality of unaccompanied migrant children. It is at least three stories. Journeys to yet unknown destinations. Children moving away from the home they have known to an unfamiliar place, traveling by car, by train, on foot, always beginning with hope and anticipation, but those emotions dissipating as the journey continues. It is about the disintegration of life the way it once was; o...
I can see why Lost Children Archive has been nominated for awards. It addresses one of the most pressing issues of modern times. It's inventive, it takes risks with form. Not all of them succeed, in my eyes, but you have to give the author respect for trying something different.The story centres on an American road trip. A woman and her husband, both documentarians, are travelling from New York to Arizona with their children from past relationships - a ten-year-old boy (his) and a five-year-old
a really stunning road trip novel that has its finger on the pulse of modern american life. multimedia novels often feel meta for meta's sake but the documents, the archives, and the polaroids in this novel actually aid the narrative immensely, it's so rare that this style of novel works this well. the 'elegies' presented throughout, for me, harked back to the border writings of Tomás Rivera and Gloria Anzaldúa, two comparisons I do not make lightly! easily one of the best and most essential nov...