Lost Children Archive (Luiselli)

Lost Children Archive 
Valeria Luiselli, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525520610


Summary
An emotionally resonant, fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border—an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.

A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives—through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas—we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure—both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most.

With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 16, 1983
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—B.A., National Autonomous University of Mexico; Ph.D., Columbia University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Valiera Luiselli is a Mexican-born author and academic, who lives in the United States. Her most recent novel Lost Children Archive was published in 2019.

Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She has since lived in the U.S., Costa Rica, South Korea, India, Spain, and France. After earning a B.A. in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Luiselli moved to New York City to dance.

After a time, Luiselli returned to academia, studying Comparative Literature at Columbia University and completing her Ph.D. Currently, she lives in New York City, where she teaches literature and creative writing at Hofstra University. She also collaborates as a writer with a number of art galleries and has worked as a librettist for the New York City Ballet.

Writing and recognition
Luiselli is the author of the book of essays Sidewalks (2013) and the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her novel The Story of My Teeth (2015) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction and the Azul Prize in Canada.

Her most recent nonfiction book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions (2017), was described by the Texas Observer as "the First Must-Read Book of the Trump Era." It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.

In 2014 Luiselli was the recipient of the National Book Foundation "5 under 35" award. Luiselli's books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s and The New Yorker. (From various online sources including Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/7/2019.)

Book Reviews
Engrossing…brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising—a passionately engaged book [with] intellectual amplitude and moral seriousness, [and] a beautiful, loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s family; just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence.… Luiselli [is] playful and brave.
James Wood - The New Yorker
 

A highly imaginative, politically deft portrait of childhood within a vast American landscape—a rollicking tale that contains within it an extremely disciplined exercise in political empathy. Luiselli takes the minds of children seriously, and the reader witnesses their intelligent eyes and ears recording each detail of the borderlands and registering the full terror of them. Luiselli braids and reworks disparate texts….[Characters’] experiences overlap to create a patchwork representation of how America might see itself. The novel’s most thrilling section [is] a single sentence sustained for some twenty pages near the end, which remains measured and crystalline, expertly controll[ed]…. Luiselli shows the reader something she wouldn’t normally see, and also maps the past onto the present in ways that can reveal hidden contours in both.
Lidija Haas - Harper’s


(Starred review) Luisell's powerful, eloquent novel… demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her superb novel makes a devastating case for compassion by documenting the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process (31 photos).
Publishers Weekly


The shifting sensibility from observer to child to child migrant gradually pulls readers inside the migrants' nightmare journey to create a story that, if fragmented, feels both timely and intelligent. —Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal


(Starred review) Poignant, intense, keenly timely.… [P]olitically relevant. Stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge.… This is one of few novels that… conveys the urgency of this unsettling situation.
Booklist


(Starred review) Remarkable, inventive.… As the novel rises to a ferocious climax, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of our emotional reserves. A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Whom do you immediately associate with the "lost children" of the title? How many layers of getting lost appear throughout the novel, and is it always/only children who are lost?

2. What are some of the reasons behind the family’s trip to Apacheria? Discuss the parents’ separate and combined work projects and their expectations for what will happen to the family once they reach their destination.

3. What is the difference between a documentarian and a documentarist? How do the two forms of study, observation, interpretation, and synthesis make their way into the story of the family and the structure of the novel itself?

4. Can you identify the source(s) of conflict between the husband and wife? Which memories of their early life together and time at home with the children, as well as how they respond to the children during the car ride, suggest why they might not be able (or willing) to stay together?

5. The wife/mother is the arguably the primary narrator of the novel, and it’s through her that we understand the goings-on of the trip. Does she prove herself a reliable narrator, and if not, what are her biases in telling this story?

6. The seven boxes in the family’s trunk each belong to a different family member. Do you think you could identify the owner of each box based solely on its contents? What does this suggest about how the characters know one another, and also about how they chose to represent themselves in what they packed for the trip? Consider the wife’s question, "How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?" (57).

7. Maps, news clippings, sound recordings, photographs, books, poems, loose notes—these are some of the items that appear in the boxes/text. The family also listens to music, and to audiobooks, in the car. How does having different media contribute to the polyphony of the novel? What do these documents suggest about whether the characters can, or cannot, know a definitive "truth"?

8. For most of the book the four family members don’t have first names, except their chosen Apache names: Swift Feather, Papa Cochise, Lucky Arrow, and Memphis. How are these names more or less representative of their identities in this time period, and to what degree are they chosen or given? How do they ultimately help unite the family when they’re separated, literally and figuratively?

9. How do the stories of Manuela’s daughters and the children on the plane motivate the mother on her journey and in her work?

10. What are the most memorable and significant stops the family makes along the way? How do they reinvent themselves in various situations, and what does this flexibility in their identity suggest both about their bonds and about America today?

11. Consider the repeated stories that are told and read throughout the novel: Geronimo’s fall, Elegies for Lost Children, "Space Oddity," Lord of the Flies, etc. How do they overlap with and inform the narrative of the novel? Do these connections influence your understanding of the novel as an "archive" in and of itself?

12. Although "the boy" is biologically related to his father and "the girl" to her mother, what connects the boy to the mother in the novel? Describe their bond, including how they test and support each other along this journey, and how they share space as.

13. How do the sections in Part II and Part III narrated from the boy’s point of view reflect or shift the mother’s point of view? Reading his interpretation of the events she narrated, did you find any holes, gaps, or misunderstandings in what she knew about him and Memphis—or (potentially surprising) similarities?

14. How does the boy’s voice differ from the mother’s, besides the obvious differences of their age and life experience? Consider his reliance on his camera, the Polaroids in his box, and the stream-of-consciousness narrative in the "Echo Canyon" chapter.

15. What are the children’s ideas about what it will mean to be lost, and how do they each work to stay together even when they’re forced apart? In this sense, are they more in control of their memories—that is, are they more or less "lost"—than their parents?

16. By the end of the novel, has the meaning of "home" changed for the characters? What are some of the ways home was lost, found, and reimagined?

17. The author offers a Works Cited at the end of the book to describe the various references and allusions she draws upon throughout the novel. How does this information change your understanding of what is fact versus fiction, and of the ways stories get passed down among works of art over time? After reading Luiselli’s description of her methodology, would you describe her as a documentarian or a documentarist?

18. The novel draws upon a number of real-life current events and stories about the immigration crisis in the United States. How did you feel about the way this situation was presented? Does the author’s referencing of so many histories and time periods, and narratives of displacement, create a more universal portrayal of being uprooted or without a country? Have you ever felt a similar kind of displacement?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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