Valeria Luiselli

Lost Children Archive

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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019
The moving, powerful and urgent English-language debut from one of the brightest young stars in world literature
{"em"=>["Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. What would happen then?"]}
A family in New York packs the car and sets out on a road trip. A mother, a father, a boy and a girl, they head south west, to the Apacheria, the regions of the US which used to be Mexico. They drive for hours through desert and mountains. They stop at diners when they’re hungry and sleep in motels when it gets dark. The little girl tells surreal knock knock jokes and makes them all laugh. The little boy educates them all and corrects them when they’re wrong. The mother and the father are barely speaking to each other.
Meanwhile, thousands of children are journeying north, travelling to the US border from Central America and Mexico. A grandmother or aunt has packed a backpack for them, putting in a bible, one toy, some clean underwear. They have been met by a coyote: a man who speaks to them roughly and frightens them. They cross a river on rubber tubing and walk for days, saving whatever food and water they can. Then they climb to the top of a train and travel precariously in the open container on top. Not all of them will make it to the border.
In a breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive intertwines these two journeys to create a masterful novel full of echoes and reflections — a moving, powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
This book is currently unavailable
421 printed pages
Original publication
2019
Publication year
2019
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Quotes

  • anasofiasfhas quoted6 years ago
    Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future.
  • Gerardo Arteagahas quoted4 years ago
    I put the book back in its box and open Box I, digging around inside it carefully. I take out a brown notebook, on the first page of which my husband has written “On Collecting.” I jump to a random page and read a note: “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility.” A few lines down there’s a quote copied from a book by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Genius: the highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces, and the highest of being—collected.”
  • Gerardo Arteagahas quoted4 years ago
    In my husband’s Box II, under some notebooks, there’s a book titled The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer. I remember reading it many years ago and understanding only a meager portion of it but understanding at least that it was a titanic effort, possibly in vain, to organize the surplus of sound that human presence in the world had created. By separating and cataloging sounds, Schafer was trying to get rid of noise. Now I flip through the pages—full of difficult graphs, symbolic notations of different types of sounds, and a vast inventory that catalogs the sounds of what Schafer referred to as the World Soundscape Project. The inventory ranges from “Sounds of Water” and “Sounds of Seasons,” to “Sounds of the Body” and “Domestic Sounds,” to “Internal Combustion Engines,” “Instruments of War and Destruction,” and “Sounds of Time.” Under each of these categories, there is a list of particulars. For example, under “Sounds of the Body” there is: heartbeat, breathing, footsteps, hands (clapping, scratching, etc.), eating, drinking, evacuating, lovemaking, nervous system, dream sounds. At the very end of the inventory is the category “Sound Indicators of Future Occurrences.” But, of course, there are no particulars listed under it.

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