Lost Children Archive: A novel

By Valeria Luiselli

NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood ... This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.
 
Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.
 
A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9780525520627

Valeria Luiselli

Valeria Luiselli (Ciudad de México, 1983) es una escritora y ensayista mexicana. Es autora de los libros de ensayo Papeles Falsos (2010) y Los niños perdidos (2016) y de las novelas Los ingrávidos (2011) La historia de mis dientes (2013) y Desierto sonoro (2019).

Book preview

Cover for Lost Children Archive

ALSO BY VALERIA LUISELLI

Tell Me How It Ends

The Story of My Teeth

Faces in the Crowd

Sidewalks

Book Title, Lost Children Archive, Subtitle, A novel, Author, Valeria Luiselli, Imprint, Knopf

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2019 by Valeria Luiselli

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Aragi, Inc.: Excerpt of Father’s Old Blue Cardigan from Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson, copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Aragi, Inc. All rights reserved.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: Excerpt of Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight from Collected Poems by Galway Kinnell. Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

International Editors’ Co., on behalf of Bárbara Jacobs and María Monterroso: El Dinosaurio by Augusto Monterroso, copyright © 1959 by Augusto Monterroso. Reprinted by permission of International Editors’ Co., on behalf of Bárbara Jacobs and María Monterroso.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luiselli, Valeria, [date] author.

Title: Lost children archive : a novel / by Valeria Luiselli.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018390 | ISBN 9780525520610 (hardcover) | 9780525520627 (ebook) | 9781524711504 (open market)

Subjects: LCSH: Family life. | Immigrant children—United States—Social conditions. | Illegal alien children—United States—Social conditions. | Immigrant children—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States. | Illegal alien children—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States. | United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life.

Classification: LCC PQ7298.422.U37 L67 2019 | DDC 863/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018018390

Ebook ISBN 9780525520627

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Charlie Pond

ep_prh_5.4_c0_r4

To Maia and Dylan, who showed me childhood all over again.

Contents

Cover

Also by Valeria Luiselli

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I: Family Soundscape

Relocations

Box I

Routes & Roots

Box II

Undocumented

Box III

Missing

Box IV

Removals

Part II: Reenactment

Deportations

Maps & Boxes

Box V

Continental Divide

Lost

Part III: Apacheria

Dust Valleys

Heart of Light

Echo Canyon

Part IV: Lost Children Archive

Box VI

Document

Box VII

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

Illustration Credits

A Note About the Author

PART I

Family Soundscape

RELOCATIONS

An archive presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies.

—ARLETTE FARGE

To leave is to die a little.

To arrive is never to arrive.

—MIGRANT PRAYER

DEPARTURE

Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around again to study the map. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate. An airplane passes above us and leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky. Behind the wheel, my husband adjusts his hat, dries his forehead with the back of his hand.

FAMILY LEXICON

I don’t know what my husband and I will say to each of our children one day. I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version—even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we’ll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.

The boy turned ten yesterday, just one day before we left New York. We got him good presents. He had specifically said:

No toys.

The girl is five, and for some weeks has been asking, insistently:

When do I turn six?

No matter our answer, she’ll find it unsatisfactory. So we usually say something ambiguous, like:

Soon.

In a few months.

Before you know it.

The girl is my daughter and the boy is my husband’s son. I’m a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them. My husband is a father and a stepfather, to each one respectively, but also just a father. The girl and boy are therefore: step-sister, son, stepdaughter, daughter, step-brother, sister, stepson, brother. And because hyphenations and petty nuances complicate the sentences of everyday grammar—the us, the them, the our, the your—as soon as we started living together, when the boy was almost six and the girl still a toddler, we adopted the much simpler possessive adjective our to refer to them two. They became: our children. And sometimes: the boy, the girl. Quickly, the two of them learned the rules of our private grammar, and adopted the generic nouns Mama and Papa, or sometimes simply Ma and Pa. And until now at least, our family lexicon defined the scope and limits of our shared world.

FAMILY PLOT

My husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. The soundscape was meant to sample and collect all the keynotes and the soundmarks that were emblematic of the city: subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministers preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange. But it also attempted to survey and classify all the other sounds that the city produced and that usually went by, as noise, unnoticed: cash registers opening and closing in delis, a script being rehearsed in an empty Broadway theater, underwater currents in the Hudson, Canada geese flocking and shitting over Van Cortlandt Park, swings swinging in Astoria playgrounds, elderly Korean women filing wealthy fingernails on the Upper West Side, a fire breaking through an old tenement building in the Bronx, a passerby yelling a stream of motherfuckers at another. There were journalists, sound artists, geographers, urbanists, writers, historians, acoustemologists, anthropologists, musicians, and even bathymetrists, with those complicated devices called multibeam echo sounders, which were plunged into the waterspaces surrounding the city, measuring the depth and contours of the riverbeds, and who knows what else. Everyone, in couples or small groups, surveyed and sampled wavelengths around the city, like we were documenting the last sounds of an enormous beast.

The two of us were paired up and given the task of recording all the languages spoken in the city, over a period of four calendar years. The description of our duties specified: surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak. We were good at it, it turned out; maybe even really good. We made a perfect team of two. Then, after working together for just a few months, we fell in love—completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who the rock was and who the bird—and when summer arrived, we decided to move in together.

The girl remembers nothing about that period, of course. The boy says he remembers that I was always wearing an old blue cardigan that had lost a couple of buttons and came down to my knees, and that sometimes, when we rode the subway or buses—always with freezing air pouring out—I’d take it off and use it as a blanket to cover him and the girl, and that it smelled of tobacco and was itchy. Moving in together had been a rash decision—messy, confusing, urgent, and as beautiful and real as life feels when you’re not thinking about its consequences. We became a tribe. Then came the consequences. We met each other’s relatives, got married, started filing joint taxes, became a family.

INVENTORY

In the front seats: he and I. In the glove compartment: proof of insurance, registration, owner’s manual, and road maps. In the backseat: the two children, their backpacks, a tissue box, and a blue cooler with water bottles and perishable snacks. And in the trunk: a small duffle bag with my Sony PCM-D50 digital voice recorder, headphones, cables, and extra batteries; a large Porta-Brace organizer for his collapsible boom pole, mic, headphones, cables, zeppelin and dead-cat windshield, and the 702T Sound Device. Also: four small suitcases with our clothes, and seven bankers boxes (15″ x 12″ x 10″), double-thick bottoms and solid lids.

COVALENCE

Despite our efforts to keep it all firmly together, there has always been an anxiety around each one’s place in the family. We’re like those problematic molecules you learn about in chemistry classes, with covalent instead of ionic bonds—or maybe it’s the other way around. The boy lost his biological mother at birth, though that topic is never spoken about. My husband delivered the fact to me, in one sentence, early on in our relationship, and I immediately understood that it was not a matter open to further questions. I don’t like to be asked about the girl’s biological father, either, so the two of us have always kept a respectful pact of silence about those elements of our and our children’s pasts.

In response to all that, perhaps, the children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They’re like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism. The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades or even centuries ago. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we’re able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning.

FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS

In our beginning was an almost empty apartment, and a heat wave. On the first night in that apartment—the same apartment we just left behind—the four of us were sitting in our underwear on the floor of the living room, sweaty and exhausted, balancing slices of pizza on our palms.

We’d finished unpacking some of our belongings and a few extra things we’d bought that day: a corkscrew, four new pillows, window cleaner, dishwashing soap, nails, hammer. Next we measured the children’s heights and made the first marks on the hallway wall: 33 inches and 42 inches. Then we’d hammered two nails into the kitchen wall to hang two postcards that had hung in our former, respective apartments: one was a portrait of Malcolm X, taken shortly before his assassination, where he’s resting his head on his right hand and looking intently at someone or something; the other was of Emiliano Zapata, standing upright, holding a rifle in one hand and a saber in the other, a sash around one shoulder, his double cartridge belt crosswise. The glass protecting the postcard of Zapata was still covered in a layer of grime—or is it soot?—from my old kitchen. We hung them both next to the refrigerator. But even after this, the new apartment still looked too empty, walls too white, still felt foreign.

The boy looked around the living room, chewing pizza, and asked:

Now what?

And the girl, who was two years old then, echoed him:

Yes what?

Neither of us found an answer to give them, though I think we did search hard for one, perhaps because that was the question we’d also been silently threading across the empty room.

Now what? the boy asked again.

Finally, I answered:

Now go brush your teeth.

But we haven’t unpacked our toothbrushes yet, the boy said.

So go rinse your mouths in the bathroom sink and go to sleep, my husband replied.

They came back from the bathroom, saying they were scared to sleep alone in the new bedroom. We agreed to let them stay in the living room with us, for a while, if they promised to go to sleep. They crawled into an empty box, and after puppying around for the fairest division of cardboard space, they fell into a deep, heavy sleep.

My husband and I opened a bottle of wine, and, out the window, we smoked a joint. Then we sat on the floor, doing nothing, saying nothing, just watching the children sleep in their cardboard box. From where we were sitting, we could see only a tangle of heads and butts: his hair damp with sweat, her curls a nest; he, aspirin-assed, and she, apple-bottomed. They looked like one of those couples who’ve overstayed their time together, become middle-aged too fast, grown tired of each other but comfortable enough. They slept in total, solitary companionship. And now and then, interrupting our maybe slightly stoned silence, the boy snored like a drunk man, and the girl’s body released long, sonorous farts.

They’d given a similar concert earlier that day, while we rode the subway from the supermarket back to our new apartment, surrounded by white plastic bags full of enormous eggs, very pink ham, organic almonds, corn bread, and tiny cartons of organic whole milk—the enriched and enhanced products of the new, upgraded diet of a family with two salaries. Two or three subway minutes and the children were asleep, heads on each of our laps, tangled humid hair, lovely salty smell like the warm giant pretzels we’d eaten earlier that day on a street corner. They were angelic, and we were young enough, and together we were a beautiful tribe, an enviable bunch. Then, suddenly, one started snoring and the other started farting. The few passengers who were not plugged into their telephones took note, looked at her, at us, at him, and smiled—difficult to know if in compassion or complicity with our children’s public shamelessness. My husband smiled back at the smiling strangers. I thought for a second I should divert their attention, reflect it away from us, maybe stare accusingly at the old man sleeping a few seats from us, or at the young lady in full jogging gear. I didn’t, of course. I just nodded in acknowledgment, or in resignation, and smiled back at the subway strangers—a tight, buttonhole smile. I suppose I felt the kind of stage fright that comes up in certain dreams, where you realize you went to school and forgot to put on underwear; a sudden and deep vulnerability in front of all those strangers being offered a glimpse of our still very new world.

But later that night, back in the intimacy of our new apartment, when the children were asleep and were making all those beautiful noises all over again—real beauty, always unintentional—I was able to listen to them fully, without the burden of self-consciousness. The girl’s intestinal sounds were amplified against the wall of the cardboard box and traveled, diaphanous, across the almost empty living room. And after a little while, from somewhere deep in his sleep, the boy heard them—or so it seemed to us—and replied to them with utterances and mumbles. My husband took note of the fact that we were witnessing one of the languages of the city soundscape, now put to use in the ultimately circular act of conversation:

A mouth replying to a butthole.

I suppressed the desire to laugh, for an instant, but then I noticed that my husband was holding his breath and closing his eyes in order to not laugh. Perhaps we were a little more stoned than we thought. I became undone, my vocal cords bursting into a sound more porcine than human. He followed, with a series of puffs and gasps, his nasal wings flapping, face wrinkling, eyes almost disappearing, his entire body rocking back and forth like a wounded piñata. Most people acquire a frightening appearance in mid-laughter. I’ve always feared those who click their teeth, and found those who laugh without emitting a single sound rather worrisome. In my paternal family, we have a genetic defect, I think, which manifests in snorts and grunts at the very end of the laughing cycle—a sound that, perhaps for its animality, unleashes another cycle of laughter. Until everyone has tears in their eyes, and a feeling of shame overcomes them.

I took a deep breath and wiped a tear from my cheek. I realized then that this was the first time my husband and I had ever heard each other laugh. With our deeper laughs, that is—a laugh unleashed, untied, a laugh entire and ridiculous. Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. My husband and I finally recomposed ourselves.

It’s mean to laugh at the expense of our sleeping children, yes? I asked.

Yes, very wrong.

We decided that what we had to do, instead, was document them, so we took out our recording gear. My husband swept the space with his boom pole; I zoomed my handheld voice recorder up close to the boy and the girl. She sucked her thumb and he mumbled words and strange sleep-utterances into it; cars drove by outside in the street into my husband’s mic. In childish complicity, the two of us sampled their sounds. I’m not sure what deeper reasons prompted us to record the children that night. Maybe it was just the summer heat, plus the wine, minus the joint, times the excitement of the move, divided by all the cardboard recycling ahead of us. Or maybe we were following an impulse to allow the moment, which felt like the beginning of something, to leave a trace. After all, we’d trained our minds to seize recording opportunities, trained our ears to listen to our daily lives as if they were raw tape. All of it, us and them, here and there, inside and outside, was registered, collected, and archived. New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

Later, tired and having lost momentum, we carried the children in our arms into their new room, their mattresses not much larger than the cardboard box where they had been sleeping. Then, in our bedroom, we slid onto our own mattress and wedged our legs together, saying nothing, but with our bodies saying something like maybe later, maybe tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll make love, make plans, tomorrow.

Goodnight.

Goodnight.

MOTHER TONGUES

When I was first invited to work on the soundscape project, I thought it seemed somewhat tacky, megalomaniacal, possibly too didactic. I was young, though not much younger than I am now, and still thought of myself as a hard-core political journalist. I also didn’t like the fact that the project, though it was orchestrated by NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and would eventually form part of their sound archive, was in part funded by some huge multinational corporations. I tried to do some research on their CEOs—for scandals, frauds, any fascist allegiances. But I had a little girl. So when I was told that the contract included medical insurance, and realized that I could live on the salary without having to do the myriad journalistic gigs I was taking on to survive, I stopped researching, stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract. I’m not sure what his reasons were, but at around the same time, my husband—who was then just a stranger specialized in acoustemology and not my husband or our children’s father—signed his.

The two of us gave ourselves completely to the soundscape project. Every day, while the children were in daycare and school, respectively, we went out into the city, not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new. We traveled in and out of the five boroughs, interviewing strangers, asking them to talk in and about their native tongues. He liked the days we spent in transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops. I liked the days we spent in schools, sampling children. He’d walk around the crowded cafeterias, his Porta-Brace sound bag hanging from a strap around his right shoulder, his boom held up at an angle, recording the cluster of voices, cutlery, footsteps. In hallways and classrooms, I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual, physical tongues—pink, earnest, disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues: the difficult position of the tongue’s tip in the Hispanic erre, the quick tongue-slaps against the palate in all the polysyllabic Kichwa and Karif words, the soft and downward curved bed of the tongue in the aspirated Arabic h.

The months passed, and we recorded voices, collected accents. We accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing.

TIME

We also accumulated things: plants, plates, books, chairs. We picked up objects from curbsides in affluent neighborhoods. Often, we realized later that we didn’t really need another chair, another bookshelf, and so we put it back outside, on the curbside of our less-affluent neighborhood, feeling that we were participants in the invisible left hand of wealth redistribution—the anti–Adam Smiths of sidewalks and curbsides. For a while, we continued to pick up objects from the streets, until we heard on the radio one day that there was a bedbug crisis in the city, so we stopped scavenging, quit redistributing wealth, and winter came, and then came spring.

It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life. One day, our books didn’t fit in the bookshelves anymore, and the big empty room in our apartment had become our living room. It had become the place where we watched movies, read books, assembled puzzles, napped, helped the children with their homework. Then the place where we had friends over, held long conversations after they’d left, fucked, said beautiful and horrible things to each other, and cleaned up in silence afterward.

Who knows how, and who knows where the time had gone, but one day, the boy had turned eight, then nine, and the girl was five. They had started going to the same public school. All the little strangers they had met, they now called their friends. There were soccer teams, gymnastics, end-of-year performances, sleepovers, always too many birthday parties, and the marks we had made on the hallway wall of our apartment to register our children’s heights suddenly summed up to a vertical story. They had grown so much taller. My husband thought they grew tall too fast. Unnaturally fast, he said, because of that organic whole milk they consumed in those little cartons; he thought that the milk was chemically altered to produce premature tallness in children. Maybe, I thought. But possibly, also, it was just that time had passed.

TEETH

How much more?

How much longer?

I suppose it’s the same with all children: if they are awake inside a car, they ask for attention, ask for bathroom stops, ask for snacks. But mostly they ask:

When will we get there?

We usually tell the boy and girl it’ll be just a little while. Or else we say:

Play with your toys.

Count all the white cars that pass.

Try to sleep.

Now, as we halt at a tollbooth near Philadelphia, they suddenly wake up, as if their sleep were synchronized—both between the two of them and, more inexplicably, with the car’s varying accelerations. From the backseat, the girl calls out:

How many more blocks?

Just a little while till we make a stop in Baltimore, I say.

But how many blocks till we get all the way to the end?

All the way to the end is Arizona. The plan is to drive from New York to the southeastern corner of the state. As we drive, southwest-bound toward the borderlands, my husband and I will each be working on our new sound projects, doing field recordings and surveys. I’ll focus on interviews with people, catch fragments of conversations among strangers, record the sound of news on the radio or voices in diners. When we get to Arizona, I’ll record my last samples and start editing everything. I have four weeks to get it all done. Then I’ll probably have to fly back to New York with the girl, but I’m not sure of that yet. I’m not sure what my husband’s exact plan is either. I study his face in profile. He concentrates on the road ahead. He’ll be sampling things like the sound of wind blowing through plains or parking lots; footsteps walking on gravel, cement, or sand; maybe pennies falling into cash registers, teeth grinding peanuts, a child’s hand probing a jacket pocket full of pebbles. I don’t know how long his new sound project will take him, or what will happen next. The girl breaks our silence, insisting:

I asked you a question, Mama, Papa: How many blocks till we get all the way there?

We have to remind ourselves to be patient. We know—I suppose even the boy knows—how confusing it must be to live in the timeless world of a five-year-old: a world not without time but with a surplus of it. My husband finally gives the girl an answer that seems to satisfy her:

We’ll get all the way there when you lose your second bottom tooth.

TONGUE TIES

When the girl was four and had started going to public school, she prematurely lost a tooth. Immediately after, she started stuttering. We never knew if the events were in fact causally related: school, tooth, stutter. But in our familial narrative, at least, the three things got tied together in a confusing, emotionally charged knot.

One morning during our last winter in New York, I had a conversation with the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. We were in the auditorium, waiting to vote for new parent representatives. The two of us stood in line for a while, exchanging stories about our children’s linguistic and cultural stalemates. My daughter had stuttered for a year, I told her, sometimes to the point of non-communication. She’d begin every sentence like she was about to sneeze. But she had recently discovered that if she sang a sentence instead of speaking it, it would come out without a stutter. And so, slowly, she had been growing out of her stuttering. Her son, she told me, had not said a word in almost six months, not in any language.

We asked each other about the places we were from, and the languages that we spoke at home. They were from Tlaxiaco, in the Mixteca, she told me. Her first language was Trique. I had never heard Trique, and the only thing I knew about it was that it is one of the most complex tonal languages, with more than eight tones. My grandmother was Hñähñu and spoke Otomí, a simpler tonal language than Trique, with only three tones. But my mother didn’t learn it, I said, and of course I didn’t learn it either. When I asked her if her son could speak Trique, she told me no, of course not, and said:

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

After we voted, right before saying goodbye, we introduced ourselves, though it should have been the other way around. Her name was Manuela, the same as my grandmother’s name. She found the coincidence less amusing than I did. I asked her if she might be willing to let me record her one day, and told her about the sound documentary my husband and I were almost finished working on. We had not yet sampled Trique—it was a rare language to come by. She agreed, hesitantly, and when we met in the park next to the school a few days later, she said she would ask for one thing in exchange for this. She had two older daughters—eight and ten years old—who had just arrived in the country, crossing the border on foot, and were being held in a detention center in Texas. She needed someone to translate their documents from Spanish into English, at little or no cost, so she could find a lawyer to defend them from being deported. I agreed, without knowing what I was getting myself into.

PROCEDURES

First it was just translating legal papers: the girls’ birth certificates, vaccination records, one school report card. Then there was a series of letters written by a neighbor back home and addressed to Manuela, giving a detailed account of the situation there: the untamable waves of violence, the army, the gangs, the police, the sudden disappearances of people—mostly young women and girls. Then, one day, Manuela asked me to go to a meeting with a potential lawyer.

The three of us met in a waiting room in the New York City Immigration Court. The lawyer followed a brief questionnaire, asking questions in English that I translated into Spanish for Manuela. She told her story, and the girls’ story. They were all from a small town on the border of Oaxaca and Guerrero. About six years ago, when the younger of the two girls turned two and the older was four, Manuela left them in their grandmother’s care. Food was scant; it was impossible to raise the girls with so little, she explained. She crossed the border, with no documents, and settled in the Bronx, where she had a cousin. She found a job, started sending money back. The plan was to save up quickly and return home as soon as possible. But she got pregnant, and life got complicated, and the years started speeding by. The girls were growing up, talking to her on the telephone, hearing stories about snow falling, about big avenues, bridges, traffic jams, and, later, about their baby brother. Meanwhile, the situation back home became more and more complicated, became unsafe, so Manuela asked her boss for a loan, and paid a coyote to bring the girls over to her.

The girls’ grandmother prepared them for the trip, told them it would be a long journey, packed their backpacks: Bible, water bottle, nuts, one toy each, spare underwear. She made them matching dresses, and the day before they left, she sewed Manuela’s telephone number on the collars of the dresses. She had tried to get them to memorize the ten digits, but the girls had not been able to. So she sewed the number on the collars of their dresses and, over and over, repeated a single instruction: they should never take their dresses off, never, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American, be it a policeman or a normal person, they had to show the inside of the collar to him or her. That person would then dial the number sewed on the collars and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.

And it did, except not quite as planned. The girls made it safely to the border, but instead of taking them across, the coyote left them in the desert in the middle of the night. They were found by Border Patrol at dawn, sitting by the side of a road near a checkpoint, and were placed in a detention center for unaccompanied minors. An officer telephoned Manuela to tell her that the girls had been found. His voice was kind and gentle, she said, for a Border Patrol officer. He told her that normally, according to the law, children from Mexico and Canada, unlike children from other countries, had to be sent back immediately. He had managed to keep them in detention, but she was going to need a lawyer from now on. Before he hung up, he let her speak to the girls. He gave them five minutes. It was the first time since they’d left on the journey that she’d heard their voices. The older girl spoke, told her they were okay. The younger one only breathed into the phone, said nothing.

The lawyer we met with

Reviews for Lost Children Archive

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listed to this in audiobook format.

This novel is about a family on a road trip, relocating from NY to Arizona. The parents are both documentarians interested in refugee children at the US border and the history of the Apache Indians. Sound recordings and book passage readings are featured as the narrator (mom) ponders the nature of storytelling and story tellers. But the book is also about family, parenting, and the stories kids extract from their childhood. It is sensitive, intellectual, and has just a touch of mysticism. The structure of the novel is unique and well executed. I was glad it didn't become a political diatribe about immigration.

[FaryRC · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I hate the American dream, and I hate it even more when people do not understand the true situation of the country, being blind to their ideals of reaching a paradise full of hell. (Translated from Spanish)

[marenpergamino · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I believe that "Sound Desert" deserves much more exposure than it has because what Valeria Luiselli does in this case is GENIUS! She writes a book of a quality comparable to literary prowess.

At first glance, the story is about an epic journey across the United States by a family that is dissolving. In addition to describing the marital crisis and the dynamics between parents and children, Valeria touches on such important topics as the massacre of the Apaches by the gringos and the terrible role that the United States plays regarding its migrants, especially cruel when they are minors. There is a legion of "lost children" who, due to certain circumstances, travel alone and must enter the country illegally to reunite with their parents.

I already know we are all going to fall into the trap of questioning the parents and not the immigration authorities. How can they let them travel alone? How can they be so irresponsible as to subject them to the countless dangers of entering a country that does not want them? Obviously, we will judge without knowing. What if those people are desperate? What if they live in inhumane conditions? What if perhaps that hellish odyssey is their only chance to save their children? But we (and yes, I include myself) from the comfort that safety gives us will focus on them and not on the state monster that awaits them with its jaws wide open. The United States is the only country in the world that receives those seeking asylum with bullets (literally). Even if they are children.

Moreover, it is unlikely that we can really grasp the pain that those abandoned kids go through, who are often raped, humiliated, mutilated, shot, and abandoned in the Sonoran Desert, where even today, the echoes of thousands of dead children cry out.

The book, for me, is invaluable, although I must clarify that at a certain point it becomes slow. But that slowness is coherent and coincides with what usually happens in journeys of such magnitude. When you are about to reach the halfway point, you feel like you need to go to the bathroom, your back hurts, and your children have asked "when will we arrive?" 800 times... you feel like time stops, and the journey will be eternal. Until you pass to the second half of the trip, and everything starts flowing again. Exactly that happens with "Sound Desert."

The book has thousands of themes, and I cannot cover them all, but I do not want to end the review without making two very, very special mentions.

The first is that in this story, while traveling, the mother reads "the elegy of the lost children." I was enjoying the book so much that I started googling frantically to see where I could find it. Well, guess what!!! It doesn't exist!!! It's a fictional book!! In reality, it was written by Luiselli herself within the kind womb of "Sound Desert." This means that she didn't just write one book! She wrote two!! One within another!

And finally, I want to talk about some real women who appear in a fragment of the narrative and that I got to know because I read "Sound Desert" with a Mexican friend. He told me: "they exist, Maren. They are the patronas of Veracruz. You have to meet them." A group of beautiful women who for 25 years have been cooking and preparing food rations that they distribute to the thousands and thousands of migrants who travel on "the beast," an infernal train that never stops. Every day, without fail, they stand on the train tracks to throw lunches and feed those hungry people. Humble women who, without having anything, give everything. If God exists, he is reflected in the eyes of those beautiful, beautiful, infinitely beautiful women.

P.S.: Even if you don’t read the book, do yourself a favor and search on YouTube "the patronas: lending a hand to the migrant." It will move you. (Translated from Spanish)

[paroof · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This beautifully written book seems to be something different to everyone who reviews it. While yes, it is overtly about immigration - to me, it's also about sound, and words, and documenting, and memories, and journeys.

It's exactly the kind of book I enjoy and also exactly the kind of book I probably wouldn't recommend to most. There is a plot, but it's mostly introspection.

It was a strange coincidence that while I was reading this book, the governor of Florida illegally lured and flew migrants and asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard as a political stunt. This just underscored the ongoing plight of lost children I was reading about.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is much to admire in Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli. The writing is wonderful, the setting is interesting, the style of the book is original and her characters, especially the son and daughter are spot-on. This is a book that is guaranteed to make you think, she covers a wide variety of topics, from how thousands of unaccompanied migrant children are processed in an immigration system that is not prepared and at times even hostile to the their situation; to the history of the native Indians and the treatment they received at the hands of the American government.

But along with these bigger issues, she also tells a wonderful story as she delves into the intricacy of family life as the bulk of the book is set in a car as a family takes a road trip, driving from New York City to Arizona. The couple is in conflict as he wants to relocate to Arizona for his research on Apaches while she can’t imagine leaving New York and her work chronicling missing child refugees. With a slowly dying marriage and two lively and perceptive children, who sense problems even if they aren’t exactly sure what they are, they head across America.

Lost Children Archive takes the great American road trip and twists it into a story of alienation and estrangement with the author staying true to both her political opinions and her personal empathy. I believe this is a polarizing book that one will either love or hate, personally I came down mostly on the side of love, although I found the switching of the narrator toward the end a little off-putting. I do know that I will be thinking of Lost Children Archive for quite some time.

[iira_24 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alkoi (ja jatkui) vähän raskaasti ja tuntui ettei kerronta ala vetää. Loppua kohti kasvoin kiinni tähän kerronnan ja näkökulmien sekamelskaan, mutta ehkä vain niissä osioissa jotka kerrottiin lasten näkökulmasta. Aikuisiin en muodostanut mitään tunnesidettä.
Jotenkin suomennos vähän tökki, ehkä lasten puhetapa erityisesti. Olisi pitänyt lukea englanniksi mutta tämä nyt sattui tulemaan suomeksi ensin vastaan.

[angelalam-300700 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Almost too perfect--language and structure--but I didn't connect with the characters.

[martha_thayer-45494 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I agree with (or at least understand the basis for) the comments of many other readers, both positive and negative. The one thing that annoyed me the most was the narrator's certainty that her marriage couldn't be saved.

[josephcamilleri-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some books challenge our expectations of what a novel is or what it should be. "Lost Children Archive" is a case in point. Ostensibly a "road novel", it shows us a family (a husband, a wife and their respective son and daughter from previous marriages) on a road trip between New York and Arizona. The couple met when they were working on a documentary project on the various languages of New York. However, their latest projects seem to be pulling them apart: the husband becomes obsessed with the last of the Apaches whereas the wife is planning a sound documentary on children detained at the border. It is clear that the family is breaking up, but this internal division becomes itself a symbol of families of migrants forcibly split apart.

In classic "post-modern" fashion, the narrative teases out links between the various strands of the story; sways between realism and fantasy/magical realism; and incorporates into the story such unlikely items as inventories of the contents of the boxes accompanying the family on the trip.

Much as I appreciate the work's originality and admire its complexity, I must admit that finishing this book was a challenge to me. Its best parts were brilliant, but there were points when I started asking myself whether the novel was being too clever for its own good. So I'll go for three stars on this - I don't doubt it's a very good (and very topical) novel, and others have rightly extolled its virtues. However, I can't say I really enjoyed it...

[snash_44 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent, thought provoking book about lost children, Apache, Guatemalan refugees, and children of a dissolving marriage. All the stories are told in an overlapping manner including allusions to dreams, illusions, communion with the environment, loyalty, memories, documenting the echos, all presented in beautiful language.

[castlelass · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Powerful story about a family that travels from New York to Arizona by car to research the ancestral home of the Apache so the father can record what remains of their civilization. The father is a “documentarian” and the mother “documentarist,” and the differences between the two become a recurring theme. The parents experience increasing levels of conflict, and the two children (a ten-year-old boy and five-year-old girl) sense something is amiss. In the background, there are radio accounts of immigrant children detained at the Mexican border as well as reports of children wandering in the desert. The mother has been helping an immigrant locate her children.

It is narrated by the mother in short chapters, reflecting what is happening during their trip as well as her inner thoughts that wander from future worries to events of the past. This style is particularly effective in mimicking a road trip, where passengers see different landscapes out the window, doze off, and wake up to new environments. The story is interspersed with descriptions of the content of boxes, which we assume are stored in the trunk.

This book illuminates the telling of stories through various lenses (archives, credentials, documents, recordings of sights and sounds, physical journeys). It also examines the plight of immigrant children and refugees. It sheds light what a person can do to alleviate the suffering of others and to understand the forces that created the suffering in the first place. I found it relevant and insightful.

[AgusLapietra · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brief book that serves as a first overview of a problem that does not seem to have a short-term solution: Central American and Mexican migrant children arriving in the United States fleeing from gangs and a harsh life.

I liked the resource the author uses of taking the 40 questions that are asked to the kids in immigration when they are detained, and how from there the opening of the topics she addresses arises. (Translated from Spanish)

[Llargo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The journey of a "reconstituted family" from one side of the United States to the other, towards what was the last bastion of "Apache" freedom, intertwines with the harsh reality of the lost children in the migratory exodus.
Apparently, the plot does not seem to delve deeply into either of the two themes, and only thanks to the introduction of the "red book" do we get a little deeper into the second.
This occurs gradually, as until almost halfway through the work, it is the mother who narrates. Short chapters follow, allowing for a superficial, agile read. However, it is not lacking in interest. In fact, there are certain autobiographical details from the author.
Suddenly, the narrative thread falls into the hands of the child, and at first, I become scared because I fear that the entire journey will repeat itself from his childlike perspective. Fortunately, that is not the case, and past references begin to dwindle.
It is then that the story takes a turn and shifts from "journalistic" realism to fiction.
What happens next is pure frenetic action that cascades in the form of text without paragraphs or chapters. It was at that point that I could not stop reading until I reached the end.

Reality and fiction merge. In a deeper sense, I feel that the fictional part is a critique of the path taken by the lost children, by migrants. How can this be real?

Sadly, it is. Devastating.

I cannot conclude without mentioning how interesting and novel the use of so many metatextual and material elements has been for me. Also, the clarification of sources, the commentary, and in summary, being a mine of inspiration. (Translated from Spanish)

[G. Munckel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of those novels that is read slowly, trying to make it last a long time. Here, Luiselli revisits the theme of her essay The Lost Children: the migration of children trying to cross the border to reach the United States, escaping the violence in their hometowns, searching for their relatives on the other side. A complex and sensitive subject, but this time she approaches it through fiction, somewhat laterally, while narrating the story of a modern marriage (a woman and her husband, his son, and her daughter) and a road trip that could end in their dissolution. On one hand, as they travel from New York to Arizona (she seeking to record the testimonies of migrants; he seeking to capture sounds of Apache territories to reconstruct their history), the mother reflects on the landscape they traverse, on family, on their readings, on the sounds and voices they record, on migration, on politics, on her own profession. The songs they listen to on the journey, the books they read in motels along the way, the children's games and questions, and family conversations are also present. On the other hand, there is the voice of the boy, who tells his sister—so she won't forget—the story of when they escaped from their family, venturing into the desert to search for the lost children they had heard so much about during their journey. The result is a book full of lucid and beautiful observations, in addition to a memorable story that uses empathy in a brilliant way. I know I will reread it. (Translated from Spanish)

[miplumainconsciente · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

<>

✍️ Great book! In this opportunity, Valeria Luiselli takes us on a road trip with a blended family: a Mexican mother, an American father, and two children aged 5 (her daughter) and 10 (his son). The couple, both audio documentarians, reveal that despite what has been built, they have different projects and neither wants to yield to the other's project. They embark on a journey through the Southwest of the United States, where he seeks the Apaches, the last free men in the U.S. who inhabited the desert on the way to Arizona, and she decides to accompany him but without sidelining her project—the voices of the lost children who attempt to cross the border from Mexico to the north of the United States in search of a better future without adults accompanying them, traveling on the roofs of trains surrounded by dangers. Many do not succeed, and those are the voices Valeria wants to raise in this beautiful novel. During this journey, the crisis in their marriage will be revealed, a rupture that seems inevitable.

? Throughout the reading, we will encounter many elements, we will learn about the family dynamics, stories of the Apaches told by the father, as well as stories of the lost children, and also the geography of the entire trip that the author meticulously captures in detail.

? There are three narratives: the mother’s voice in the longest chapter, the voice of the 10-year-old boy, and the voice of the lost children.

⚡♥️Personally, I really liked it; it has nuances and hints that make you empathize with the characters, with the music, and with the stories of the family. (Translated from Spanish)

[Marlene Estrada · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brief but timely and harsh regarding the topic it addresses: the migration of children from Central American countries to the United States.

The author recounts her own experience as a legal immigrant from Mexico and at the same time shares her experience working as an interpreter at an association that aims to help children who arrive in the country, almost always alone, illegally to avoid deportation. She describes the causes of this phenomenon that go beyond the "American dream" and have deep roots in the uncontrollable violence experienced in Central American countries. She reminds us that such problems are often perpetuated by the same political, cultural, and daily life dynamics of the United States: arms trafficking, drug consumption.

I am struck by the coldness with which many people refer to migrants without stopping to think that leaving their homes must be the hardest decision and what terrible things they must be experiencing to prefer to leave them and risk crossing borders, risking their lives and integrity, perhaps to arrive at a place that ultimately is not truly a destination, especially when all this involves children. Yet this text is a demonstration of how they are perceived and how the governments (both of the countries of origin and the U.S.) disengage from such problems and focus on attacking the symptom without truly addressing the underlying causes.

It is a very difficult book because it reveals a social reality in all its rawness, a reality in which, in some way, we are involved and that leaves you with a deep feeling of frustration for how little or nothing we can do about it. (Translated from Spanish)

[Esther Mateo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I leave here the link to my blog with the comment about this book. (Translated from Spanish)

[UnaPibaLeyendo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

? Sound Desert
✍? Valeria Luiselli - ?? -
? @editorial_sigilo

.

? What is the meeting point with our family?
? What does our life map look like?
? If you were a sound, what would you be?
? Have we all ever been lost children?

.

? “A map is a silhouette, a contour that groups disparate elements, whatever they may be. To cartograph is to include as much as to exclude. Cartographing is also a way to make visible what is generally hidden.”

. (Translated from Spanish)

[brookiexlicious · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Early on while reading this book, I came to the conclusion that it’s not going to be for everyone. I already know the subject matter, illegal immigration & deportation involving children, is a hot button issue that divides many. The style of this book too, is not your average cut and dry model. There are pages dedicated to the research findings from the adult protagonists, lengthy discussions on the study of audio & wavelengths and frequencies, Polaroid pictures, and towards the end of the book a child narrator whose prose goes on for a breathless 5+ pages with only commas as punctuation. ⁣
But as for me? Those pictures in the back of the book and the subject matter were what drew me to the book in the first place. I enjoyed the differing points of view from the adult narrator and the child, although I would have loved to read some of the story from the adult male’s viewpoint as well. ⁣
This story does have a timely subject matter, but it’s also a story about dreams, hope, despair, love, marriage, parenthood, childhood, legacies, legends, and parts of our nation’s history and people that have been wronged in the past. This book made me take a step back and really think about my white American privilege, and put into perspective the struggles that others face, especially as they try to provide a better life for their families.⁣

[bookconcierge · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Digital audiobook performed by the author, Kivlighan de Montebello, William DeMeritt, and Maia Enrigue Luiselli.


A cross-country journey from New York to Arizona gives one family – mother, father, 10-year-old boy, five-year-old girl – an opportunity to explore the history of this nation from two perspectives: How the immigrant Europeans, in the name of expanded opportunities, wrested the land from the native population, and how their descendants are trying to keep a new wave of immigrants from seeking their own opportunities.

As they travel, they sing along with the songs on the radio, play games, stop at various tourist attractions. They encounter people of all walks of life, and differences the parents sometimes struggle to explain to the children. And they begin to hear more and more news coverage of a growing crisis along our nation’s southern border – the many children who are desperately trying to enter the country.

I loved the way this unfolded. Luiselli changes narrators hallway through the book, first giving us the mother’s perspective, and then the son’s. Both parents work to document things, but one is a documentarian and the other a documentarist. I’m still not sure I fully understand the difference, but clearly this difference is important to both the man and the woman. What’s important to the reader is the way they are documenting what is happening, in their family, in nature, in the nation, in the world. And this forces the reader to think about how we remember things. The same photograph of a landmark, or a family gathering, will elicit different memories from those who viewed that same event together. And a child’s interpretation will be far different from an adult’s.

As distressing as the images and stories of the lost children trying to enter this country are, the specifics of this family’s journey had me on the edge of my seat. I could not help but think of the Stephen Sondheim song “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods.

Luisselli’s writing is evocative of time and place. I could clearly picture the changing landscape as the family travels across the United States.

I am so looking forward to my F2F book club discussion of this book!

The audiobook is performed by a team including the author, Kivlighan de Montebello, William DeMeritt, and Maia Enrigue Luiselli. This was a very effective way of reading this book. However, the text has numerous photographs, drawings, maps, which are difficult to convey in audio format. Though I applaud the team for how they managed this, I’m glad I had a text version handy so I could see what they were describing.

[carriewuj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Literary fiction to the nth degree. Every sentence was fraught with meaning not to mention the book's structure and style. I could probably read it multiple times and still gain insight. On the "story" line, this is a tale about a family on the verge of splitting up. Already pieced together from its inception with the mother and daughter (the girl, 5 yrs. old) uniting with the father and son (the boy, 10 yrs. old) when the couple married a few years earlier after completing an NPR-type soundscape project, the marriage is fraying for lack of a common project and because of misplaced passions toward work. The father is a documentarist and the mother is a documentarian (according to the son, a documentarist is like a librarian and a documentarian is like a chemist) Both are super cerebral so the story is colored by their intellectual approach to life. The mother is the narrator of the first half of the story and she has a lot of time for reflection because the family is on a road trip from NYC to New Mexico to embark on the parents' next projects which will not be together. The father is researching the Geronimo and the Apace tribe, to find "echoes" in the landscape and the mother is on a quest to find 2 young immigrant girls from Mexico who are lost in the current policy debacle. They are the daughters of an NYC friend. The family packs up a rented Volvo with practical stuff, but also archival boxes for their projects. The contents of the boxes become the framework for the unfolding of the story. The narrator says: "I suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed." (p. 42) The concepts of sound and echo are repeating motifs throughout. In trying to explain the idea of documenting things to the son she muses: "I suppose that documenting things - through the lens of a camera (his 10th birthday gift) on paper, or with a sound recording device - is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world." (p. 55) While the parents use microphones and recorders to capture the sounds of the trip, the boy uses Polaroid pictures, which are actually included in the book in a clever layer of meaning. Although this is present day, the family travels without electronics - not even GPS, just a massive road map, and the ride is filled with stories from the father about the Apache tribe, its leaders, the topography of what used to be Apacheria and time period of the final battles that led to the reservation destination for native peoples. The mother tells tales of the "lost children" - the missing refugee girls and all the others like them which has its own substory in Elegies for Lost Children. "...in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as the 'lost children.' And in a way, I guess they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood." (p. 75) Their own children internalize these stories and jumble them and fall in and out of drowsy car motion sleep and mix them with dreams. Or they listen to music or to Lord of the Flies as an audiobook. This part of the book makes me both envy them and dislike them - I'd love to be that intellectual, but who thinks Lord of the Flies is appropriate for 2 young kids?! These practicalities aside, I really love this book and its deep dive into so many aspects of family, marriage, travel, societal ills, work, ideologies, art. The second half of the book is narrated by the son, and spurred on by the stories they have heard the whole trip, the children set out on their own misguided journey to save the lost children, but in effect become them. Spurred on by their NYC street smarts, the Apaches' bravery, and empathy for the immigrants, the children set out into the desert on foot, taking their own oddyssey and creating their own archive. Ultimately, the center cannot hold for this family, although the crisis of the missing boy and girl almost create a point of unity. The trip is a farewell tour, but also a starting point for each of them as individuals. Luiselli has written eloquent nonfiction about the immigration issue, having worked as a translator for those seeking asylum in the US. This clearly informs her fiction here, as well as a depth and breadth of literature and music and history. This book is a carefully crafted masterpiece of poignant memory and thoughtful reflection that bears witness for those who do not have the luxury. Quotes of note: "Traveling in the tight space of the car, we realize how little we know our two children, even though of course we know them. We listen to their backseat games. They are strangers, especially when we add them together. Boy and girl, two startlingly distinct individuals whom we often just consider a single entity: our children." (p. 74) "Unhappiness grows slowly. It lingers inside you, silently, surreptitiously. You nourish it, feeding it scraps of yourself every day....Unhappiness takes time, but eventually it takes over completely. And then happiness - that word- arrives only sometimes and always like a sudden change of weather." (p. 104)

[nivramkoorb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that I read based on reviews. The subject matter and the format of the author were very innovative. However, at the end, the book left me flat. It was almost too clever for its own good. The story revolves around a road trip with a father, mother, son(father's from a previous marriage) and daughter(mother's from a previous relationship). There are no names used just Mama, Papa, Boy, Girl. For most of the book, the mother is the narrator with the 10 year old son(the daughter is 6) taking over. The parents met on a sound recording project but now the husband is consumed with the Apaches in Southeast Arizona so the family piles into their car and goes across the country from Brooklyn to Arizona. Along the way the meet America while the mother dwells on immigrant children and their trials as they attempt to come to our country. Many people have loved this book and I did appreciate the goal but could not enjoy the journey. It was like walking through mud. I finished it but it was difficult. Because I review all books I read so I can give my opinion, I suggest that you do your own internet research on this one and decide for yourselves whether you want to take it on.

[MaxiQuino · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel brings together two major themes: that of the journey and that of the exodus. The journey is made by this blended family from New York to the Arizona desert, where the soundscape, geography, spirituality, and even the political climate are perceived. The exodus refers to the real issue of children who go missing at the border between the U.S. and Mexico. By the way, the novel in English is called "Lost Children Archive." In this case, either title, in English or Spanish, is quite fitting.

The novel is quite ambitious, aiming to address everything from complex themes of daily life to current crises like immigration. However, the author managed to add a twist that leads to a good ending. The story is narrated by three different voices (the mother, the child, and a third person), and there is a sort of "inception" where there is a novel within the novel. This "inception" is a stroke of genius. I love that in novels the protagonists talk about books and songs or that what they are listening to at that moment is narrated. Now, every time I hear "Space Oddity" (Ground Control to Major Tom), I won't be able to avoid associating it with the siblings in this plot. (Translated from Spanish)

[MissPrat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The truth is that it is written in a very accurate way, but it has felt long to me. The journey across the United States and a marriage give rise to overly complex discussions for someone as down-to-earth as I am. I have to say that I enjoyed it, but it didn't capture my attention. I greatly recognize the writer's ability when it comes to writing, that's for sure. (Translated from Spanish)

[OrendaLectora · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Sound Desert
Valeria Luiselli

There are books you would like to underline completely and save phrases, thoughts that you would believe were written for you.
Well, that is "Sound Desert," two opposing words that come together to create a story.

Valeria uses all the resources she knows to shout in this novel what she wants the world to know.

From a completely modern family of four members—two parents, two worlds, two projects, two ambitions, two paths, two children—they tell us in their daily exercise how each parent has different interests, leading them to start thinking about taking different paths.
This family, which has no names or surnames, embarks on a journey by car from New York to Arizona.

The family's dynamics are fantastic during the trip;
they share stories, anecdotes, experiences.
They listen to music, audiobooks, travel, and allow themselves to be guided by physical maps, collecting sounds and echoes, doing everything any family does to entertain themselves on long road trips.

Through the dialogues of the parents, the children confuse two stories: one of the father and his Apaches (which bored me a little) and the anxieties the mother recounted about the lost children at the border. This helps the children create memories.

The narrative thread keeps us reading continuously and wanting to know more about what they are experiencing.
Two narrative voices that allow us to know the story from two very important and different perspectives.

This profound, complex, and emotional reading that vindicates injustices, makes visible real, harsh, and cruel events, shows us the bond of two siblings who are united from the heart and not by blood.

In May 2021, the author was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award for this work written in English.

I invite you to enter the marvelous pen of Valeria Luiselli.
This well-written work full of books, poetry, photography, art, and music.
It did not leave me indifferent.

Thanks to my reading companion @serparaleer We read and discuss.
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Have you read @valeria.luiselli? (Translated from Spanish)

[YaniCza · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I acknowledge that at first it only hooked me because of the references to other books and music made by the author, however, I was moved when I finished it.
One story, many stories. A marriage on a journey to the end, the lost children, two siblings connected to all of that more than any adult could imagine, not even their parents.
I finished the book in tears and that's why I recommend it.
Ground Control to Major Tom, Commencing countdown engines on, check ignition... (Translated from Spanish)

[bell7_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A family - the narrator, her husband, the boy (her husband's son) and the girl (her daughter) - take a cross country road trip from their home in New York to New Mexico, where the husband is working on a sound project and wants to see where the Apache lived.

Our unnamed narrator reflects a lot on the incompleteness of our memories and our narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves and others that are shaped, rather than perfectly preserved. What stories become history? What do we leave out? At the same time, in the boxes the family brings along with them on the trip and create in memories along the way becomes their own imperfect archive and family history. The reflective writing caused me to read slowly for much of the book, but I was also surprised by the change of gears and at one point was reading almost feverishly to even find a stopping point. Probably as perfectly crafted a book as I have ever read, and one I feel I would have to reread again to fully appreciate.

[LecturaLateral · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this novel, two stories converge: that of a blended family with a woman and her 5-year-old daughter and a man with his 10-year-old son, and that of migrant children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle of Central America, lost crossing the desert and the border into the United States. "All those children were fleeing indescribable circumstances of abuse and systemic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become para-states, usurping power and claiming the administration of justice. And those children had come to the United States seeking legal protection, looking for their mothers or fathers, or searching for other relatives who had migrated before and might take them in. They were not seeking the American Dream, as is often said. The children were simply looking for an escape from their everyday nightmare."

Valeria Luiselli, a writer and essayist dedicated to making this tremendous reality visible, narrates this story with fluency and sensitivity. It is a tale of echoes, sounds, journeys, maps, life projects, books, music, and archives, told through two voices, that of the mother and the son of this family. A couple of acoustic ecologists, who document the diversity of languages in New York through sound, assemble their families, but years later, embark on different personal projects. She becomes involved with the story of migrant children and, as a political radio journalist, decides to investigate and bring it to light from the perspective of the children. Her husband, on the other hand, immerses himself in a documentary project about the Chiricahua Apaches, indigenous inhabitants of the American Southwest. These different paths lead them to live in different states and fragment their family. Sounding Desert is their final journey together along the routes from New York to Arizona.

A beautiful and necessary novel that is moving and gripped my heart, about blended families, motherhood and fatherhood, abandonment, migration, and the risk faced in the hope of a better future. A story that invites us to reflect on how we build our world from the language we use, how we document history, how we construct personal and collective memory. It is a privilege to accompany this family. Treat yourselves to this journey. (Translated from Spanish)

[Esteban Barroso · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A 10-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl. Two siblings in the back seat of a car, with an endless road ahead announcing an uncertain destination. The parents check maps, listen to the radio, read stories, search for echoes, and try to find the impossible words. They know that this trip is the end point for them, for their blended family project, for their future together. The children, in the back seat, play, imagining themselves as Apaches and cowboys. And from time to time, they wonder what will happen to them once all of this is over, if they will ever be able to see each other again when they find themselves in distant cities. (Translated from Spanish)

[Dean Moriarty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This road trip novel could well fit within journalistic chronicle or metaliterary essay. It has everything, and you learn a lot along the way, with the brave and risky proposal of this Mexican author. The narration articulates the fragments with elegant, jovial, and sincere prose, even allowing for devices like the change of narrator halfway through the story where the mother passes the baton to the eldest son through the mutual contemplation of an object moving in the sky. The plot begins abruptly within an unconventional family in New York City. After completing the work project that brought them together four years ago, recording the sounds of the city, a couple manages to build a common life together with their respective children, a 10-year-old boy (his son) and a 6-year-old girl (her daughter). United, they form a warm and secure 'we,' whose extinction is suddenly threatened when he informs her that he has decided to embark on a new project thousands of kilometers away, specifically in the Apache territories of the Arizona desert, land that was inhabited by "the last people who were free in the U.S." Resisting the idea of an inevitable breakup, she decides to accompany him, introducing some changes to the itinerary to help shape his new project: recounting the journey of migrant children through the desert that separates Central America from the U.S. With this plan and several boxes of archives filled with books and documents in the trunk of the car, they embark on a journey that will take them across the American Southwest, through long roads and dark motels, visiting lost towns and recording the echoes of realities and people who no longer exist. Along the way, we will learn the small story of this family tribe, resonating with the clear-sighted boldness of the children that contrasts with the dramatic reality of child immigration on one hand, and the genocide of native Indians that splashes throughout the story. It is impossible to summarize all that this novel contributes, which has deservedly been included in most of the best of 2019 lists. Highly recommended! (Translated from Spanish)