Jenny (Reading Envy)'s Reviews > Lost Children Archive

This might be the best book I've read all year. It's about refugees, lost children, memory, family, and what can truly be captured about a place or moment in time. Personal connections abound - sound capture, archival boxes, Steven Feld, marriage, so much that goes deep and I'll be thinking about for some time.

Here I will place some random quotations, for now.

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

"The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there's not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger."

"Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology."

"I want to, but I know better. With men like this one, I know I'd play the role of lonely hunter; and they, the role of inaccessible prey. And I'm both too old and too young to pursue things that walk away from me."

"Perhaps it is in those stretched-out moments in which they meet the world in silence that our children begin to grow apart from us."

"Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don't fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight."

I finished this five days ago and still can't even wrap my head around expressing how much meaning it holds for me.