A Lost Family

I really wanted to like this book. It deals with important social issues...

1. The immigration crisis & its effects on families
2. Family dissolution and its effects on children
3. The ecfects of parents self absorption on children
The parents in this book were so focused on helping others and documenting the wrongs of society that they were blind to the pain they inflicted on the people closest to them, their own "lost children".
It was a very dense text in which the author inserted related stories and quotes. This took away from the flow of the story.

( )

Modernist fiction and political activism have been brought together to produce Lost Children Archive. Luiselli is the daughter of a Mexican ambassador. She grew up in countries around the world as her father was posted to them to represent his nation, she is the holder of a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University, she is a professor at Hofstra, and, like myself and probably most people who will read this novel, has political values commonly found in people from such a cosmopolitan, intellectual, relatively elite background. When the southern border crisis grew around 2014 or so, Luiselli admirably volunteered her time and efforts to help the desperate refugees trying to reach the United States navigate the US legal system. One isn't surprised to read that this novel began as a self-admitted screed against American racism and American imperialism before being put on hold and later re-worked as a modernist intertextual manuscript, in dialogue with Pound, Eliot, Woolf, and others.

Does it work, judging it as fiction (as we have to take it for granted that it won't change a thing politically)? In the first half of this novel of two parts, the story is told from the point of view of a mother traveling by car from NYC to the border area with her soon-to-be ex-husband and their two children. She is working on a story about the children who travel to the border alone and disappear in their attempt, wiped from the map, except sometimes as a red X marking where bodies are found in the desert. She questions her project, mirroring Luiselli herself no doubt:

Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? I should know, by now, that instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young adult novels, boring art in general. Professional hesitance: But then again, isn't art for art's sake so often an absolutely ridiculous display of intellectual arrogance? Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else's suffering?

Along the way she and her family come into contact with some unfortunately stereotypically drawn caricatures of bigoted residents of "middle America". There is a funny scene though when she and her husband meet a man who is an enthusiast of Westerns, and in trying to fake a sympathetic fondness for them herself, she can only come up with Bela Tarr's Satantango, which the clueless gentleman admits to being unfamiliar with and suggests they watch it together. Our family flees before discovery. As a scene demonstrating the vast cultural gulf and disconnectedness between stereotypical "coastal elites" and stereotypical "middle America", it's pretty good.

In part two of the story, the narration shifts to her ten year old son, who takes along his five year old sister as they run away from their parents to find some "lost children" and make their way to a location of importance to the Apache tribe, whose genocidal destruction by the white imperialists is the focus of the husband. His voice is sometimes completely unbelievable as a child, and sometimes boringly simplistic enough to be so. It culminates in a fever dream of a 20 page long sentence in which his viewpoint alternates with that of a small group of lost refugee children who seem to physically emerge from a book he and the mother have been reading in a whirlwind of, what, neo-magical realism? Definitely odd, sometimes engrossing, sometimes not.

Overall for me it is a novel that is highly intellectual, produces lots to discuss, and is moderately enjoyable as a work of fiction. ( )

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2021 Explores what holds a family and society together and what pulls them apart. It juxtaposes rich, poetic prose with direct storytelling.

(7.5)I have been anticipating reading this book for a few years, especially after reading [American Dirt]. If I remember correctly, Luiselli was critical of [[Jeanine Cummins]], for sensationalizing a very serious situation in her book. I personally found [American Dirt] a page-turner and thought it drew my attention to the crisis.
Not so, in this novel. I found it slow moving and struggled to engage with the individual members in this family. I found both parents portrayed were self-absorbed and very focused on pursuing their career paths. The road trip sounded tedious for the children. I, also wondered if there was an autobiographical element to the story. The story finally gains momentum when the son picks up the narrative and this section saved the book from a lower rating by me. However, this section was also written in solid text of one single long sentence! I recommend you make time to read it in one sitting, possibly the purpose of this devise. ( )

First, let me say that if I were just reviewing the writing of this book alone, it would definitely be in five star territory. I loved the narrative voices, especially of the mother, and the use of language. I also found it interesting how the author used literary references and wove in language and metaphors of other authors. I wouldn't hesitate to pick up another book by this author.

All that being said, thematically, I think this book tried way too hard. Ostensibly, the story is about a blended family where a father with a son married a mother with a daughter. The father and mother met on a work project where they connected, but when that project ended, their divergent career goals started to tear them apart. And there in lies my first critique, their career goals really were not all that different, and it's pretty hard for me to imagine their marriage falling apart because of them, and yet, the reader wasn't really shown much else about the marriage, so there's no other conclusion that can be reached.

The novel goes on to attempt to tie the history of the Apache Indians to our current immigration situation with the imminent loss of this family. The Apache references seemed completely superfluous to me. I didn't think they added to the theme nor really enhanced the story. Ostensibly, the father was obsessed with researching them, but beyond that, it just seemed extraneous and distracting.

The parallels between some of the challenges with our immigration/refugee issues here in the U.S. and the loss of family due to divorce worked better for me. The son narrates the second half of the book, and I felt there were specific scenes that related to his step sister that were so well done. I felt his pain at both the thought of losing her and the real loss of her. The issues regarding immigration were mostly put forward in the form of chapters of a book that the son and mother were reading called the Elegies of Lost Children, and the sorrows and struggles evoked there were moving.

All in all, I would have liked to see this book edited differently. I felt that the author's true strengths were muddied by trying to do too much. Sometimes less is more, and the prose was evocative and beautiful making the "cleverness" just feel like overreaching.

( )