Fionnuala's Reviews > Lost Children Archive

The image of an empty frame appeared in my mind when I started reading this book, and the more I registered how framing was being used as a metaphor, the more clearly I began to see into Valeria Luiselli's project which had seemed quite blurred in the early pages. By the end of the book, all the stories and histories she managed to insert into that frame had developed themselves into a vivid and powerful image.

Images and metaphors are part of Valeria Luiselli's writing technique though she begins her narrative focusing on the capturing of sound as a way to document our world rather than on written narrative. Somewhere along the way however, there is a shift from the focus on sound to a focus on words, and Luiselli makes the shift with the insertion of short snippets from a fictional book called Elegies for Lost Children which eventually merges with and passes right through the primary story, uniting all the disparate themes in the process.

The setting for the merging is itself a frame: an open sided freight train wagon abandoned in the New Mexico desert. Inside that wagon, three themes come together, fuse and then separate. The first is a nesting eagle, symbol of the disappeared Apache tribe which forms one strand of the main narrative. The eagle's eggs are cooked and eaten by some children who take shelter in her nesting space, driving her away. These invaders are made up of two groups: four children who are the main characters of the Elegies for Lost Children narratives, and who are walking from the south carrying nothing but the hope of eventually finding their relatives in the north; and two step-siblings from the main story, who are walking south carrying the hope of finding the lost children of the Elegies and of somehow reviving their own dying family unit.

Luiselli mentions the origin of the word 'metaphor' at one point, explaining that in Greek it meant being taken somewhere. It also means 'to carry across', and in this book there are examples of both meanings. The children travelling north are taken by train, or rather on the roofs of freight train carriages, all the way across the mountains and valleys of Mexico before having to carry themselves and their slender hopes across the deserts of New Mexico. The children travelling south are taken in the back of their parents' car towards Apacheria until they decide to strike out alone, carrying their own slender hopes to the echoing canyons of the Chiricahua mountains.

But metaphor has a third meaning, or rather consequence: it serves to deepen our understanding of a text. When one of the children in this story attempts to take Polaroid photos only to find that the subject he tries to frame disappears when exposed to light, we understand that this is exactly what the entire book is about: it is about trying to ensure that the subjects it frames do not get deleted when exposed to view. The last of the Apache tribe, buried as 'prisoners of war' in a military compound inside their own territory by the invaders of that same territory, are like a blanked out Polaroid. They have disappeared. They cannot be brought back. Valeria Luiselli seems determined that the plight of the children who are being carried on the roofs of trains from misery and danger in Honduras and Mexico towards misery and danger in the US, will not also be deleted from history.

This documentary novel, full of words, images, sounds and echoes is something new in literary terms, and it works powerfully on our perception, as any good metaphor should. It forces our attention onto a blurred question we might prefer to ignore: who are any of us, wherever we are in the world, to call another human 'alien'?