Lost Children Archive

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.