Katia N's Reviews > Lost Children Archive

It is a beautiful novel.

It is not about so-called immigration crisis though there is a big shadow of it in the novel. For those who want to know the shocking facts of the crisis it is better to start with her brilliant essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questionsand The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Borderthe book by Cantu. It is not a road trip novel, at least not in the the usual sense - you would not see a lot of other people and landscape changes though you would see some. You would not spend a lot of time witnessing the struggle of the human beings with the elements either though there is a little bit of that.

It is rather a sparse and meandering space of reflection how a particular family ends. What is the place or art and its creation in the modern life. How something which was remote yesterday suddenly becomes very close, scary and urgent. How the relationship between the grown-ups affects children. How the politics cannot be disentangled from the personal, even if we would keep pretending it can. And how our children perceive the world through our eyes, but equally are trying to make sense out of it and act totally independently.

It is the novel which ask powerful questions without an attempt to answer them categorically. (In his essay The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, Javier Cercas calls this “a blind spot” of a novel and suggests it is an imperative for its long lasting impact.) And if this novel is a journey, it is more of a journey through reading books and thinking about them. All main characters - Mother, Father, the Boy (10) and the Girl (5) are the readers and story-tellers as well.

Being a Mexican and a native Spanish speaker, Luiselly has written the book in English but with the deep roots in a certain Latin American literary tradition where the act of reading by the characters, mentioning other books and their impact is a very natural process and integral part of the narrative. And this intertextuality does not feel artificial at all. In many cases, it is more important than actions and the plot. In my limited observation, this way of writing fiction is very different from the mainstream English language plot driven literature. A book about writers are frowned upon as pretensions and boring. Mentioning the other works are considered “name dropping”. It is a pity. But i think, it has begun to change with the penetration of other influences into English-language literary landscape through the works in translation and the writers like Luiselli who start writing in English.

The one of the most beautiful passages in the book is devoted to the moment when the Wife is reading Sontag. It has been quoted everywhere, I’ve heard Luiselli reading it aloud, but i cannot stop myself from quoting it here:

“When i read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time i read Arendt, Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly micro chemical ruptures - 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 consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light marks.

They are not necessary illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And the recognition and coming to terms with the darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”

I feel the allusion to the Plato’s cave in this but somehow her words are more intimate and immediate.

The perception of “name dropping” is also affected by the growth of auto-fiction in the anglo-sphere. But I would not pigeon-hall this book as auto fiction. I think her characters are imaginary, in spite of the obvious resemblance to her personal life. For example, I think the Husband here could be a man with some native american heritage (vs a fellow Mexican in real life). At least his knowledge and interest in their story and her physical description of him points me that way. Also in real life, Luiselli’s stepson was not part of her nuclear family as he was living in Mexico. But the Boy's character is very much part of the family and plays the huge role in the book.

Without being a bold proclamation, the novel is thoughtfully political. The Wife is preoccupied by her planned project about the crisis on the border as well as the disappearance of two girls of her immigrant friend. On this background, she comes across to such a line in a local newspaper: “60 or 90 thousand of alien children mass that has come to america”. She thinks: “Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but actually a little frightened. None of this is new, though i guess i am simply accustomed to dealing with more educated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.” Unhappily, I can sign up under each word of this last sentence.

Children are wonderfully natural and alive in the novel, though all they do at the first part is sitting at the back of the car. Their presence inevitably leads to a reflection how our present and the past affects future. I would just pinpoint two observations by the Wife. Being in a confounded space, they listen to the radio and discuss politics, they tell stories about the past. She thinks: “I suppose we all contribute to the xenophobic inertias with the versions of history we tell our children.” And it is so true and so unavoidable, how we program our kids with our own misconceptions which in turn, we took unconsciously from our parents. How to deal with that? Is knowing where you come from overrated?

Another, more specific observation is related to how they teach children to write in America and the UK. (I do not know about other english-speaking countries, but it is very different from where I am originally from). Her 5 years old daughter splits the page into squares for Beginning, Problem, Resolution and the End. So, at the age 5, the first thing children learn, even before they can write, that each story has to have a plot. Each story has to have a problem. Each story has to have an end. Why? I was amazed with this approach when my son was at that age. They’ve hardly talked about any stories, hardly listened to them before they’ve been taught some pragmatic, and quite frankly limiting formula. The Wife comments: Bad literary education begins too early and continues for way too long.

So many more things i can talk about. My head is still buzzing with this novel. I can mention how the echoes are playing on its pages between the present and the past, the real and the imagined. I can also mention that it is beautifully and carefully designed book; that there are polaroid photos, the list of names of the children perished crossing the border (similar to the novels of Dasa Drndic who is mentioned as well), maps, documents etc. There is also a novel within the novel which normally i would consider a step too far. But it worked for me here when i’ve figured out what it was.

The first half of the book was narrated by the Wife. Then the narrator has changed and the novel has moved into a different gear in terms of pace and the atmosphere. I struggled initially with the “suspension of disbelief”, but the novel was alluding more and more to the spirit Pedro Páramo which I’ve just finished - the one of those serendipitous coincidences -so it carried me through. And the end has moved me close to tears.

PS 1

This book was nominated on Woman’s Prize 2019. But was not shortlisted which is a real shame. The fact is vindicating my view not to read by the lists, especially the lists of the prizes.

PS2

Valeria Luiselli is a millennial born in 1983. Why don’t they call her “a voice of millennial generation” then? In my view, she is a way better than the other books by the millennials I’ve read (a very limited sample I have to admit). Maybe I know why they do not. Maybe because her writing easily transcends generational divide and talks about something timeless being deeply in engaged in our time.

Quotes:

About our time:

We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in out gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what happening or say why. Perhaps its just that we sense as absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs sunrises. We have not understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to make a picture of, or now to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way of experience space and time.

Concerns of being a modern artist (who presumably wants to make a difference):

Political concerns: 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?
Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production?
Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more susceptible it is to becoming politicised, and in these times, a politicised issue is no longer a matter that urgently calls for committed debate in the public arena but rather a bargaining chip that parties use frivolously in order to move their own agendas forward.
Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonised by Western-Saxon-white categories, whats the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?

Political Narrative to be fed to the masses:

I think of Manuela’s girls (the disappeared ones), and its hard not to be overcome by rage. But I suppose its always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-mans-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownies threaten civilised, white peace. Only such narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers.

It has won IMAC prize in May 2021, two years since I’ve read it. So well deserved. I am very happy for Luiselli. I hope she would publish something new soon.