Lost Children Archive

This is a hard book to review because it's so complex. The main story is of a husband and wife, who each bring a child to their marriage, taking a road trip from New York City to the desert Southwest so that they can each pursue documentary projects that they are passionately interested in. Even before they set out on the road trip the future of the marriage is in question, but the couple's relationship disintegrates further as they travel.

Woven through the story are themes of erasure and loss: the Apache Indian tribes who were the last tribes to surrender to the US government and who the husband is obsessed with documenting. The wife is preoccupied with unaccompanied children who attempt to enter the United States for asylum and who are unceremoniously deported back to their home countries–after enduring unbelievable hardship to get here.

One of the best things about this book is its careful attention to detail. A gesture, a commonplace phrase, the way something looks and what it suggests–all are subject to examination and consideration in the narrative. When I started reading Lost Children Archive this drove me crazy because it made the book drag. Eventually I settled down to the style, and accepted that everything was going to be subjected to the scrutiny of a poet.

There is a book inside this book, too. Elegies For Lost Children is a book that the wife brings with her on the journey and that her children sometimes read from. It's a story of a caravan of unaccompanied children traveling through hardships to reach a place of safety. It is full of literary references, from T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Latin American authors that I was not familiar with.

The main characters, the husband, wife, and two children, do not have names for the first half of the book. When they finally do acquire names, they are the names that they give each other after the husband tells a story about how Apache children were given names. The whole book is like this: constructed to place you in a mental state of discomfort, disorientation, uncertainty, to mimic what people in the book are experiencing. But there is also a feeling of distance, because the book also has a complicated intellectual underpinning that not everyone can have access to. There is a debate about whether the father or the mother are correct in calling themselves a documentarian vs. a documentarist, and I wasn't sure how seriously to take this. Was it a joke about intellectual jargon or a reference to a genuine professional disagreement? The weaknesses of the book are along this line.

It took me more than 50 pages to decide I would stick it out and finish the book, and ultimately I'm glad I did. It was challenging to read, but once I adjusted my expectations for the pacing of the story I enjoyed it.

It's a clichéd warning to photographers: take your eye away from the lens, lest you forget to see the view at all. What if your job is documenting sounds? Do you risk losing the ability to listen?

This book is an exercise in discomfort from start to finish, on so many levels. Unease sets in on page one as the narrator repeatedly refers to her children as “the girl” and “the boy”. No names. Detached, clinical, and OMFG can she ever describe a scene, what beautiful sentences, but what an eerie distance. Much of the book is what I can only describe as hazy: despite the exquisite depictions of scene, the human element was what I came to think of, for the second quarter of the book, as “the opposite of connection” – and was I ever jarred when the boy, at the beginning of the second half, describes their time in the car as “it felt like we were the opposite of being together.” It was insightful to read this during the 2020 pandemic because despite the physical isolation I've never felt as suffocatingly lonely as those four people in that car.

Uncomfortable: the woman's self-absorption, complete inability to relate to her husband or children. Uncomfortable: the persistent thread of migrant children, whose suffering we sometimes think about but always briefly and never deeply. (Has the woman's obsession with them atrophied her ability to relate to nearby flesh-and-blood humans? Is Luiselli warning us not to focus exclusively on that telephoto lens?) Uncomfortable: the silences and the ways they're sometimes filled. Very uncomfortable: the second half.

Luiselli writes beautifully, with a vocabulary that had me shivering with delight at moments. We realize that the narrator's dissociation is deliberate and not the author's own personality. And we are drawn into the story, absorbed, because it's so gracefully woven.

I've gone on way too long already but have to add one more note. Uncomfortable: Lord of the Flies. Yeah, we all hate it. One of the threads in the book relates to it. I felt very, very fortunate to have read, the very day before starting Lost Children Archive, this article about six Tongan children who survived a year and a half on a deserted island. I think it underscored Luiselli's intention.

Discomfort is good for us. It helps us grow. Push past it. Read this.