Book Report: Lost Children Archive

25. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019) (10/3/2020)

In the summer of 2014, the Mexican-born Luiselli took a trip with her husband and two children across the US, from New York City to New Mexico. On the way, while listening to the radio, they became increasingly aware of the plight of Central American migrants, especially children, on the US-Mexican border, and when she returned to New York she volunteered as an interpreter in the immigration court. Those are the kernels of this intricate novel about a family road trip, a disintegrating marriage, disappearing refugee children, the final days of the Apaches in Arizona, and the heartland of America. 

The story is first told by the unnamed narrator, a sound documentarian who remains throughout rather aloof and in her head. We never learn her name, or those of her husband (who also collects sounds, though his are ambient, hers are spoken stories) or children, who are referred to simply as "the boy" (10 years old) and "the girl" (5), each brought to the marriage from earlier relationships. They are heading to Arizona so the husband can document the "echoes" of Apacheria, and the woman has the goal of documenting the border crisis, as well as finding the two vanished children of a Mixteca acquaintance she'd met in New York. 

In the second (of four) parts, the boy takes over the narration, at first retelling from his perspective, and with his own noticings, some of what the mother had told about in part one. And then the story takes a right turn and begins to merge with that of an (invented) book with a red cover, Elegies for Lost Children by Ella Camposanto, about young refugees, which is doled out piecemeal. All of the boy's story is told in epistolary fashion, as a recounting for his little sister, whom he realizes he probably won't be living with anymore once the trip is done.

The presentation is eclectic, and full of sophisticated literary allusions, especially in part one. Featured in the story are seven bankers boxes and their "archival" contents, four belonging to the husband, one to the narrator, and one each for the children—though the latter two remain empty until the end of the book; these contents are listed between the long chapters, in very short, titled sections. Elegies for Lost Children is presented elegy by elegy, in scattered fashion. There are maps and Border Patrol reports, Polaroid pictures and newspaper clippings. One chapter of 19 pages is a single sentence.

Here are a few samples of the writing. First, the woman, as she rereads Susan Sontag's journals and finds underlining:

This last line ["The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal"] is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don't remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

The book is not all so heady. This is a road trip, after all, with young children. They sing "Space Oddity" and "Graceland" over and over in the car, they stop overnight in motels and eat in diners, they visit Asheville, NC, and the Fort Sill, Oklahoma, cemetery where Geronimo is buried. The five-year-old keeps asking what "Jesus Fucking Christ" means. There is plenty of life in this book.

I did not, as I read, flag any of the boy's narration (again, as told, in a letter-like way, to his sister), but let's see if I can find a sample. Okay, here, at random, as they arrive in New Mexico:

This whole country, Papa said, is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don't matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history, he said.
 He spoke like this sometimes, and when he did, he was usually looking out through a window or at some corner. Never at us. When we were still back in our old apartment, for example, and he got mad at us for something we'd done or maybe not done, he would look straight at the bookshelf, not at us, and say words like responsibility, privilege, ethical standards, or social commitments. Now he was talking about this whirlpool of history, and erased lives, and was looking through the windshield at the curvy road ahead as we drove up a narrow mountain pass, where there were no green things growing, no trees, no bushes, nothing alive, only jagged rocks and trunks of trees split in half as if old gods with giant axes had got angry and chopped this part of the world apart.
 What happened here? you [the little sister] asked, looking out the window, though you didn't usually notice landscapes.
 Papa said: Genocide, exodus, diaspora, ethnic cleansing, that's what happened.
 Ma explained that there had probably been a recent forest fire.

Although the father is presented as passionate here, in fact he is a rather flat character, focused largely on his fascination with the Apaches and, yes, his general simmering anger. The story is very much about the mother and the boy, their complementary realities as they journey forward into the unknown. 

I enjoyed the book, which bore a strong similarity to much contemporary fiction that I've been reading lately: the short sections, a constantly shifting narrative focus, the lack of quotation marks to denote dialogue, a somewhat distant narrator (especially the woman), the unnamed protagonists. It is intelligent and a bit cool—which is fine. But for my next book, I might look for something with more warmth and intimacy. 

P.S. Luiselli also wrote a nonfiction account of her investigation into the migrants on the border in Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017). It is a relatively short book, and one that I will be seeking out.

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On 9/17, a little over two weeks ago, the Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County stood at 9,550 confirmed cases, 553 hospitalizations, and 67 deaths. Today's numbers are 10,312 (up 762), 610 (up 57), and 75 (up 8). The pace of growth has slowed, though those affected remain largely in the Salinas Valley (83%), Hispanic (78%), and younger (69% are younger than 44) . . . so, agricultural and service workers, no doubt; people who can't afford to quarantine and who work in jobs that require close contact with others. As Trump with his army of doctors makes very clear today, the privileged have much less to worry about. Though he is not out of the woods simply because he's privileged. We'll see what his arrogance brings him. Assuming he really is sick, which I'd rather not doubt, but he is a professional liar, and his campaign is in trouble.