Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is a book I needed a long time to read and even longer time to think about it. It is also a book of many books into one: a chronicle of a marriage ending - as the own author´s - a book of loneliness, a book about catching memories, a book of the voiceless. The book was nominated for the Booker Prize 2019 and was the winner off the Dublin Literary Award in 2021.
A Mexican-American author based in the US currently, Luiselli herself is involved on behalf of children immigrants. Children of various ages, sent alone from Mexico, with a phone number sewed in their clothes hem, a number to be called upon arrival, upon survival. My son is much older than some of the children mentioned in the book, how would my sweet boy survive such an ordeal? It is a terrible thought, as terrible as the children from the Lord of the Flies, a book the protagonists may read to their children on their way to filling their working assignments.
There are two main storytellers: the mother, working on a soundscape project, and the older son, who plans an escape with his half-sister on their own, up in the mountains, aimed at getting in touch with some of the lost children their mother is so much invested into that she is mostly not present when around her own children.
Past and stories are what keep memories alive, and through sound, a sound archive, there are the emotional, contextual memories who are maintained. The wording of the book is beautiful, prose split in different small enchanting chapter, although not always necessarily part of the worded narrative.
´I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed´.
´Stories are a way of substracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight´.
There are many parts that at a close scrutiny weren´t maybe so enchanting, critically speaking. Although the story stops long before the separation took part, the fact is announced as a certitude and more than once it annoyed me, because sometimes, especially for few hundred pages novels, I don´t like predictable outcome. Also, the voice of the boy - recently 10 - was hardly recognizable from his mother´s, which was also not a pleasant experience.
What I also appreciates is the multimedia inserts, with photos, but only at the end of the book, although was feeling like it could have been used more boldly and extensively.
Lost Children Archive is an important book of our times and may open pathways to inspiration to keep exploring the topic, maybe also in a less personal key as part of a story of marital alienation.
Rating: 3.5 stars
