2019 Booker Prize Longlist: Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
CharlasBooker Prize
Únete a LibraryThing para publicar.
1kidzdoc
This thread is for discussion of Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, which is currently available in the UK, US and Canada. No unhidden spoilers, please.
2Cait86
I started Lost Children Archive the other day, and really struggled to get into it, unfortunately. I've returned it after reading only the first fifty pages. If it makes it to the shortlist, I will try again in the fall.
3Simone2
A truly wonderful book that many many people should read. Beside the incredible well written plot of a marriage falling apart and the children noticing, it describes the reality of our current world, in which our leaders refuse child refugees at our borders, and leave them by themselves in the most inhumanly way. Must read and must win the Booker Prize!
4kidzdoc
Wow! That's a ringing endorsement if there ever was one. Hmm...I may have to start this after I finish Night Boat to Tangier this evening or tomorrow.
5Cait86
>3 Simone2: Well if that won't convince me to try this book again, nothing will!
6kidzdoc
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
My rating:
This inventive, multilayered, cerebral and compelling novel is based largely on the author's experience traveling with her family from New York City to the Arizona-México border in the summer of 2014. At that time there was a crisis at the border, as tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their countries made a harrowing trek by foot and train in order to seek safety in the United States, but most were prevented from entering this country, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Luiselli, who was born in México, chronicled some of theIr stories in her earlier nonfiction book, Tell Me How it Ends.
The main narrator of Lost Children Archive is an audio documentarian and formerly single mother of a five year old daughter who captures sounds of everyday life and people in New York City, who meets and marries a fellow Mexican-American audio documentarian and father of a 10 year old son while working together on a project. Due to their common interests and backgrounds they marry and live contentedly together for some time. The marriage begins to fray, and when the husband decides to go on a trip to Oklahoma to document the journey and resting places of Geronimo and the Apache people, the last of the native Americans to lose their freedom to European invaders to their land, they decide to make a family vacation out of it. Just before they leave the narrator learns about the humanitarian crisis at the border, and she decides to chronicle it during the trip, and to attempt to locate the two young daughters of Manuela, a Central American woman she meets, who were placed in a modern day internment camp in Arizona after their arrival to the border but have become lost since then. However, it is clear that the journey will be the last one the family spends intact, as the husband intends to remain in Oklahoma to complete his project and not return to New York with his wife and children.
During the often claustrophobic journey by car the family listens to audiobooks to pass the time, taking time to sightsee and capture their discoveries by audiotape and Polaroid instant cameras, while spending their evenings in often dodgy motels in small towns in the heartland populated by Americans who are distrustful and occasionally hostile toward the Latino family. They also read books by well known authors that the parents brought with them, most notably "Elegies for Lost Children", which describes the harsh journey of children accompanied by a strange man to an unknown destination and an uncertain future.
In the second part of the book, the 10 year old boy gains a voice as a narrator, and through his eyes we see the stress that he and his sister experience as they watch their parents' slowly fraying relationship, his deep love for his parents and especially his stepsister, and his desire to locate Manuela's daughters and keep the family intact.
Luiselli, unlike the author of an inauthentic and currently popular middlebrow novel, does not attempt to tell the stories of the Lost Children, as she does not know them personally, and, being brought up in a prosperous Mexican family and having spent much of her life outside of her home country, she realizes that she cannot truly identify with the conditions that caused these immigrants to leave their homelands and the experiences they faced en route to the border and after they arrived there.
Lost Children Archive is a superb accomplishment and a very compelling novel based on the author's personal experiences, which brings attention to the plight of the Lost Children encamped at the US-México border in an intellectually satisfying and educational read without descending into inauthenticity or trauma porn. Due to its rich complexity the reader would benefit from a second or third effort, which I will do later this year or in 2021.
My rating:
This inventive, multilayered, cerebral and compelling novel is based largely on the author's experience traveling with her family from New York City to the Arizona-México border in the summer of 2014. At that time there was a crisis at the border, as tens of thousands of Central Americans fleeing violence in their countries made a harrowing trek by foot and train in order to seek safety in the United States, but most were prevented from entering this country, including thousands of unaccompanied minors. Luiselli, who was born in México, chronicled some of theIr stories in her earlier nonfiction book, Tell Me How it Ends.
The main narrator of Lost Children Archive is an audio documentarian and formerly single mother of a five year old daughter who captures sounds of everyday life and people in New York City, who meets and marries a fellow Mexican-American audio documentarian and father of a 10 year old son while working together on a project. Due to their common interests and backgrounds they marry and live contentedly together for some time. The marriage begins to fray, and when the husband decides to go on a trip to Oklahoma to document the journey and resting places of Geronimo and the Apache people, the last of the native Americans to lose their freedom to European invaders to their land, they decide to make a family vacation out of it. Just before they leave the narrator learns about the humanitarian crisis at the border, and she decides to chronicle it during the trip, and to attempt to locate the two young daughters of Manuela, a Central American woman she meets, who were placed in a modern day internment camp in Arizona after their arrival to the border but have become lost since then. However, it is clear that the journey will be the last one the family spends intact, as the husband intends to remain in Oklahoma to complete his project and not return to New York with his wife and children.
During the often claustrophobic journey by car the family listens to audiobooks to pass the time, taking time to sightsee and capture their discoveries by audiotape and Polaroid instant cameras, while spending their evenings in often dodgy motels in small towns in the heartland populated by Americans who are distrustful and occasionally hostile toward the Latino family. They also read books by well known authors that the parents brought with them, most notably "Elegies for Lost Children", which describes the harsh journey of children accompanied by a strange man to an unknown destination and an uncertain future.
In the second part of the book, the 10 year old boy gains a voice as a narrator, and through his eyes we see the stress that he and his sister experience as they watch their parents' slowly fraying relationship, his deep love for his parents and especially his stepsister, and his desire to locate Manuela's daughters and keep the family intact.
Luiselli, unlike the author of an inauthentic and currently popular middlebrow novel, does not attempt to tell the stories of the Lost Children, as she does not know them personally, and, being brought up in a prosperous Mexican family and having spent much of her life outside of her home country, she realizes that she cannot truly identify with the conditions that caused these immigrants to leave their homelands and the experiences they faced en route to the border and after they arrived there.
Lost Children Archive is a superb accomplishment and a very compelling novel based on the author's personal experiences, which brings attention to the plight of the Lost Children encamped at the US-México border in an intellectually satisfying and educational read without descending into inauthenticity or trauma porn. Due to its rich complexity the reader would benefit from a second or third effort, which I will do later this year or in 2021.
