BOOK 9 OF 16 OF LONGLISTED TITLES
In some ways this book is hard to describe or to summarize in a few sentences, because there is so much going on above and below the surface. Up front we are placed in car journeying south, a husband and wife in the front, in the back two children, each parent having brought a child to the marriage. Told through the voice of the wife, we quickly become attuned to the sad fate that waits the end of this road trip, a family whose time has come to an end, a relationship appearing to fail as each party discovered they want to explore different professional goals.
But this basic structure is filled in with the most astounding details that shape the story as it moves forward. The husband and wife met several years before working on a sound project that New York University had commissioned to record all the languages spoken in the city. The documenting of sound is given life, we are given exact details of the mechanics of the process as well as the meaning the partnership gives to what they are doing. As the project winds down, the husband and wife become determined to further the documentation of sounds, the former wanting to record the echos of now gone Apache warriors that once dominated the southwestern territories of the United States and the latter keen of giving voice (or recording voices) of child migrants caught in the harsh and merciless immigration system.
As the family travels south, both parents knowing their union may be at an end, the soundscape of the car ride is filled with the father's stories of Apache warriors, age inappropriate audiobooks the children must listen to and radio broadcasts of the migration crises, filled with stories of children who have attempted the border crossing on their own only to be detained and now face the prospect of deportation back to countries whose violence threatens their survival. The mother, whose New York friend has had her two daughters detained and have gone missing during a transfer from one institution to another, is now intent on not only documenting the lost children but finding these two girls.
Midway through the book, Luiselli shifts perspective, giving voice to the ten year old son, whose adolescent mind has absorbed and reinterpreted the stories coming from the front of the car, producing bizarre understandings of the reality that in itself is horrific and bizarre, but has become the normal for the adults. The boy slowly begins to recognize the impending end of his family and decides he must try to act in some way to impress his step mother, making a decision to run away with his five year old sister in search of the two lost girls his mother is intent on finding. The final third of the book becomes a harrowing descent into an unknown territory as the two children themselves become lost and their voices facing the threat of becoming another echo, their story another tragedy to be archived.
Luiselli is a skilled crafter of prose, her sentences filled with detail and specificity, yet beautiful in a precise but also meandering way. She captures intimate details of the characters lives and perspectives, all the while articulating the broad ideas and contemplations of the various narrators. But most striking here is her use of a plethora of literary texts, music, photography and other medium to inform the narrative, to provide background to the characters and also understand their actions as their world is about to change drastically. Each chapter begins with an opening of an archival box the family brings with them, containing works of literature, academic texts, musical scores, that not only tells their research project but become integrated into the plot of the book. She quotes passages, lyrics and even creates a fictional book within a book, Elegies of Lost Children, itself a literary allusion to other works that have sought to detail experiences of "voyages, journeying, migrating."
Some have criticized this technique as pretentious (see Mercedes Bookish Musings quite harsh and I'd contend unfair review) and I will admit that in other cases I do get annoyed with writing that seeks to name drop works of literature for the sake of bragging, An Unnecessary Woman comes to mind. But in this case, Luiselli is not trying to merely show off her incredible grasp of literature, but instead alludes and quotes to further the goals of the text in a way that is organic. As she notes in the Works Cited section after the text of the novel:
...references to sources--textual, musical, visual, or audio-visual--are not meant as side notes, or ornaments that decorate the story, but function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past.
Far from showy decoration, these references become powerful components of the text, serving the narrative, acting as echoes from the past that the present must confront. Just one example that many have cited, is the first line from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is repeated often as the audiobook player manages to default to it whenever the mother turns on the radio:
When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.
This chilling line is not there for show but serves as a foreshadow, as a constant worry of losing ones child, as a warning of potential dangers that await the young siblings. For me, this is not pretentious but an amazing sculpting of literary works to inform the narrative purposes of this novel. That Luiselli does this so well, uses these texts or other media to build an archive of this family that touches upon so much beyond their own compelling drama is one of the reasons this book is a thing of beauty.
A more concerning critique is the question of cultural appropriation and how Luiselli uses the story of the Apache to further her own story telling goals. Some have noted that this falls into the trope of treating indigenous voices as unable to speak for themselves, reinforces a narrative of victimhood and denies agency to a population that continues to rightfully insist on self-determination. In LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE, Luiselli gives the father, a Mexican American, full control over the story of the Apache, which leaves us to consider the problematics associated with this narrative decision. However, I don't believe that Luiselli is oblivious to the problems with this decision. In several interviews she discusses issues of appropriation and who has the right to tell other's stories and notes that the heart of the LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE is asking the question of where do we stand when archiving the experiences of political violence. In this case, the pressing political violence Luiselli wants to document is that of Central American child migrants and she uses analogous histories of disappearance that Native Americans have experienced to emphasize the echoing of experiences across large swaths of time. That she chooses to have those comparative experiences channeled through the voyeuristic eyes of the father is a question worth debating but a debate that I would imagine Luiselli welcomes. That other indigenous authors, such as Tommy Orange, have effusively praised the book's treatment of transcending historical experiences, signals to me that it is not so easy to condemn Luiselli's choice as a sloppy or disrespectful act of cultural appropriation.
If anything, I'd suggest the level of discussion and grappling with this text speaks to how powerful a statement it is. Beautifully written, densely packed with ideas, timely as ever, Luiselli has offered us an utterly important novel, one that asks how and where we stand as millions of migrants move around the world, looking for safe passage but met with cold rejection if not brutal violence. To have tackled such big issues through the lens of a modest road trip story speaks to how fantastic a writer Luiselli is. This will be one of the big books of 2019 and beyond and hope it gets its proper due critically and beyond.
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