felinejumper | Lost Children Archive (Reply)

What I Cried About On Wednesday, Week of 3/20 whatever, by felinejumper

SO. Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive. It's a road trip novel, a novel about a dissolving marriage, a novel about echoes and sound and memory, about the stories children and adults tell to each other, and a novel about, god, missing migrant children, children getting lost, the human atrocity of the U.S.-Mexico border. (fwiw it is also, almost incidentally, queer, but her queerness is layered amongst backstory and not at all a narrative priority.) It was a very incredibly good and intense read and I strongly recommend it while also feeling exceedingly odd about recommending a book that is...joyful but not about a joyful subject, mayhap.

It's a deeply difficult exercise in holding two modes simultaneously:

(1) beautiful and referential writing, using various books and media pieces to kickstart daydreamy rumination on a plurality of topics, and a masterful progression of narrative styles with the progression of the book. A la this section, when the narrator is re-reading her copy of Susan Sontag's journals:

"The parting was vague, because the separation still seems unreal."

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed [...] But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know.”

(2) Simultaneously it builds to bringing home the fucking horrors of the fact that children die in the desert and in the jungle and on trains and in deportation centers; and the fucking misery of loss of parents and loss of family, and the awful overwhelming bureaucracy, and bearing witness and feeling powerless, fuck, I'm so goddamn angry and I don't know what to do about it. I don't mean to make it sound exclusively miserable, or trauma-porn like...it's, just, like, here is an awful awful thing happening, what if you had to really look it in the eye, and also keep living in the world?

It also plays with archives (as you might guess from the title), deliberately; archives as what we want or need or are trying to remember at the moment of bringing them into being-- and it plays with different mediums of documenting, the written word vs the recorded noise vs photographs.

It's just really good and I'm glad I read it, and would strongly recommend it to pretty much anyone.