Hi everyone,
I’m in such a good mood these days. The sun makes me so happy. I hope you’re able to enjoy a bit of sunshine and blue skies wherever you are.
This week’s book blew my mind in so many ways. If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Love,
mariana
Why did I read this book?
My wonderful friend María Ortiz (who I miss very much) recommended Lost Children Archive a year ago. She’s an avid reader and always has good recommendations. Thank you, María!
“Documenting just means to collect the present for posterity.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
What is the book about?
It’s hard to capture in three bullet points what this book is about since it covers so many different topics that are hard to group in a way that makes sense. I’ll do my best.
A family on the verge of transformation: This book features a wife, her husband, a boy and a girl, all part of the same family. The family has been growing and forming over time, but a road trip to Apacheria is about to challenge their structure and balance. The story touches on the contrast between life projects which bind families together and the ones which bring them apart.
The art of archiving, documenting, and recording sounds: The wife and the husband (whose names we never get to know) collect and document sounds for a living. Their brains are wired to understand and explain the world through sound. I’ve never read a book before with sound-first descriptions. These descriptions are so smartly worded that I could feel like I was listening to those sounds myself. After reading this book, I realised that I barely pay attention to the sounds around me, and you might too.
Children ― lost and found: Throughout the story, the author creates a stark contrast between her own children’s lively childhoods, and that of those who are trapped in impossible migration journeys that will forever rob them of their childhoods. It’s difficult to convey with my own words the brilliant way in which she’s able to create empathy towards these children, by juxtaposing both storylines.
“Children have a slow, silent way of transforming the atmosphere around them. They are so much more porous than adults, and their chaotic inner life leaks out of them constantly, turning everything that is real and solid into a ghostly version of itself. Maybe one child, alone, by himself, cannot modify the world the adults around him or her sustain and entertain. But two children are enough—enough to break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner light.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Why should you read it?
Get to know an incredible experimental writer: Earlier this year, Valeria Luiselli won the Dublin literary award, (considered the world’s richest prize for a novel published in English), for her book Lost Children Archive. I cannot recommend this book enough, even though I know it’s not for everyone. I was absolutely absorbed by her writing style: beautiful, clever, impeccable. Every word was chosen so carefully. Luiselli masters language and makes it bend to her will, transporting readers beyond her words. I found her description abilities unparalleled and truly original.
If you want to learn more about the lost children and Apache history: If you’d like to either understand more about what refugee-seeking children go through or if you want to learn a bit about Apache history, this is a book you might enjoy. Sometimes, you hear so much about something in the news, that it loses its meaning or stops making sense. This story is a beautiful vehicle to build empathy towards children, childhood, and those robbed of their voices.
“They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop. If you’d like me to add any bookshops to the list, let me know.
UK
Spain
Mexico
Italy
US
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
I underlined too many quotes in this book, because the writing is fantastic. I decided to remove many to make this section a lighter read.
“But the children will ask, because ask is what children do.”
“The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades or even centuries ago.”
“Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh.”
“New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.”
“It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life.”
“We know—I suppose even the boy knows—how confusing it must be to live in the timeless world of a five-year-old: a world not without time but with a surplus of it.”
“I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed.”
“Children’s words, in some ways, are the escape route out of family dramas, taking us to their strangely luminous underworld, safe from our middle-class catastrophes. From that day on, I think, we started allowing our children’s voices to take over our silence. We allowed their imaginations to alchemize all our worry and sadness about the future into some sort of redeeming delirium: tooshiefreedom!”
“And recording sound, we thought, as opposed to filming image, gave us access to a deeper, always invisible layer of the human soul, in the same way that a bathymetrist has to take a sounding of a body of water in order to properly map the depth of an ocean or a lake.”
“Everyone leaves, if they need to, if they can, or if they have to.”
“Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid upon it.”
“She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”
“...suppose an archive gives you a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed. You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back.”
“Most people think of refugees and migrants as a foreign problem.”
“Imagine the first person who ever milked a cow. What a strange person.”
“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.”
“I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline.”
“I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. In our copy of Sontag’s journals, underlined once, twice, sometimes boxed-in and marked at the margins:
“One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people, the people (like parents & lovers) about whom one has been cruelly honest only in the journal.”
“I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—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 your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily 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 it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”
“Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.”
“If they are asked to pose for a portrait, they make sure their disdain is apparent, and fake a wide, cynical smile. If they are allowed to do as they please, they make porcine grimaces, stick out their tongues, contort themselves like Hollywood aliens in midseizure. They rehearse antisocial behaviors in general. Maybe it’s the same with all children. Adults, on the contrary, profess almost religious reverence toward the photographic ritual. They adopt solemn gestures, or calculate a smile; they look toward the horizon with patrician vanity, or into the lens of the camera with the solitary intensity of porn stars. Adults pose for eternity; children for the instant.
“Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?”
“Perhaps it’s just that belongings often outlive their owners, so our minds can easily place those belongings in a future in which their owner is no longer present. We anticipate our loved ones’ future absence through the material presence of all their random stuff.”
“Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.”
“Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized, and in these times, a politicized 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.”
“...about how the failure of most marriages can be explained as a change from a regular transitive verb (to fuck the other person) to a phrasal transitive verb (to fuck the other person up).”
“Generosity in marriage, real and sustained generosity, is hard.”
“An index, not so much of the things photographed but of the instant the boy finally learned to photograph them.”
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.”
“I suppose that after listening to her, we both decided, even though we never really spoke about it, that we should treat our own children not as lesser recipients to whom we, adults, had to impart our higher knowledge of the world, always in small, sugarcoated doses, but as our intellectual equals. Even if we also needed to be the guardians of our children’s imaginations and protect their right to travel slowly from innocence toward more and more difficult acknowledgments, they were our life partners in conversation, fellow travelers in the storm with whom we strove constantly to find still waters.”
“There is never a climax unless there is sex, or unless there’s a clear narrative arc: beginning, middle, end.”
“No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning. Everyone continues with their normal lives, no matter the severity of the news they hear, unless the severity concerns weather.”
“How do you fill the emotional voids that appear when there are sudden, unexpected shifts? Which reasons, which narratives, will be the ones that save you from falling, from wanting to not fall?”
“As a student, he read and listened to the work of Steven Feld, an acoustemologist who, like Murray Schafer, thought that the sounds people make, in music or in language, were always echoes of the landscape that surrounded them, and spent a lifetime sampling examples of that deep and invisible connection.”
“After listening to them for some years, he realized that the Bosavi understood birds as echoes or “gone reverberations”—as absence turned into a presence; and, at the same time, as a presence that made an absence audible. The Bosavi emulated bird sounds during funeral rites because birds were the only materialization in the world that reflected absence. Bird sounds were, according to the Bosavi, and in Feld’s words, “the voice of memory and the resonance of ancestry.””
“Feld’s ideas had formed my husband’s worldview—or rather, his world-ear—”
“And all of a sudden, the invisible presence of myriad birds would flood their ear-space, bringing into existence an entire layer of the world, previously ignored.”
“When we were in better spirits, we were able to joke about our differences. We’d say that I was a documentarist and he was a documentarian, which meant that I was more like a chemist and he was more like a librarian.”
“In other words, the ways in which we each listened to and understood the sounds of the world around us were probably irreconcilable.”
“...leaving the door of our motel room wide open because we want to hear the rain and let some of its mood come in, but also because the children laugh so uncontrollably with every page of the book that it seems right to let something of this moment, larger than the sum of us, leave the room and travel.”
“So what does it mean, Ma, to document stuff? Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light, light minus thing, photograph after photograph; or when you add sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. What you have, in the end, are all the moments that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place. Because experience, plus a document of the experience, is experience minus one. The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments cut out from it.”
“I don’t know what to say. I know, as we drive through the long, lonely roads of this country—a landscape that I am seeing for the first time—that what I see is not quite what I see. What I see is what others have already documented:”
“Documenting just means to collect the present for posterity. [...] I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently.”
“Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the 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 haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.”
“You just have to find your own way of understanding space, so that the rest of us can feel less lost in time.”
“Unhappiness grows slowly. It lingers inside you, silently, surreptitiously. You nourish it, feeding it scraps of yourself every day—it is the dog kept locked away in the back patio that will bite your hand off if you let it. Unhappiness takes time, but eventually it takes over completely. And then happiness—that word—arrives only sometimes, and always like a sudden change of weather.”
“Why is there always a little hum of hate running alongside love? a friend once wrote to me in an email, paraphrasing someone. I don’t remember if she said it was Alice Munro or Lydia Davis.”
“He is the opposite of me, in circumstance. He’s unentangled; I’m a knot. There’s my children and his childlessness. His plans for eventual children and my plans for no more. Hard to explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an unbeautified portrait of their lives. But perhaps also easy to explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before they go back to wherever they’ll sleep that night.”
“But I suppose it’s 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-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a 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. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad.”
“I read somewhere, though I don’t remember where, that removal is to deportation what sex is to rape.”
“It’s an idyllic town, protected from the world outside, perhaps not too different from the thousands of university cloisters sprinkled throughout the country, like the one my sister lives in now, where young people trade a lifetime of family efforts for credits, which become scores, which become a piece of paper that will not guarantee them anything else, nothing at all except a lifetime of living in phantasmagoric limbos between half-voluntary deployments, job searches, applications, and inevitable redeployments.”
“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 and slowly become unfathomable.”
“All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.”
“But no one had ever told us about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes. Forward, until you reach them and dissolve into them. Highway storms erase the illusory division between the landscape and you, the spectator; they thrust your observant eyes into what you observe.”
“Some people, when they sense that their lives have reached a stalemate, dynamite everything and start over. I admire those people: women who leave men, men who leave women, people who are able to detect the moment when the life they once chose to live has come to an end, despite possible future plans, despite the children they may have, despite next Christmas, the mortgage agreement they signed, the summer vacation and all the reservations made, the friends and colleagues whom they will have to explain things to. I’ve never been good at it—acknowledging an ending, leaving when I must.”
“Fear—in daytime, under the sun—is something concrete, and it belongs to the adults: speeding on the highway, white policemen, possible accidents, teenagers with guns, cancer, heart attacks, religious fanatics, insects large and medium. At night, fear belongs to children. It’s more difficult to understand its source, harder to give it a name. Night fear, in children, is a small shift of quality and mode in things, like when a cloud suddenly passes in front of the sun, and the colors dim to a lesser version of themselves.”
“The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.”
“Then she explained that enthusiasm was a kind of inner earthquake produced by allowing oneself to be possessed by something larger and more powerful, like a god or goddess.”
“Even though he’s still a child, he’s so much more culturally attuned to this country, and to the times.”
“Children have a slow, silent way of transforming the atmosphere around them. They are so much more porous than adults, and their chaotic inner life leaks out of them constantly, turning everything that is real and solid into a ghostly version of itself. Maybe one child, alone, by himself, cannot modify the world the adults around him or her sustain and entertain. But two children are enough—enough to break the normality of that world, tear the veil down, and allow things to glow with their own, different inner light.”
“Perhaps we mutually infect each other with our fears, obsessions, and expectations, as easily as we pass around a flu virus.”
“The only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges: this is how you cut your own nails, this is the temperature of a real hug, this is how you untangle knots in your hair, this is how I love you. And what children give their parents, in return, is something less tangible but at the same time larger and more lasting, something like a drive to embrace life fully and understand it, on their behalf, so they can try to explain it to them, pass it down to them “with acceptance and without rancor,” as James Baldwin once wrote, but also with a certain rage and fierceness. 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.”
“And when we forgot about time, time passed much quicker, and we also felt happier, though this can’t be explained.”
“Inventories of echoes are things made of sounds, sounds that got lost but were found by someone, or that would get lost unless they were trapped by someone, someone like Pa, who would make an inventory with them. So they were like a collection, or like a museum of sounds that did not exist anymore but that people would still be able to hear thanks to people like Papa who made them into inventories.”
“This whole country, Papa said, is an enormous cemetery, but only some people get proper graves, because most lives don’t matter. Most lives get erased, lost in the whirlpool of trash we call history, he said.”
“They said an echo is a delay in sound waves. It’s a sound wave that arrives after the direct sound is produced and reflected on a surface.”
“I decided to ask questions, good ones, so that everyone forgot about time. That way I could make time stretch longer.”
“A map is a silhouette, a contour that groups disparate elements together, whatever they are. To map is to include as much as to exclude. To map is also a way to make visible what is usually unseen.”
“The names were not secret but also they couldn’t be used just like that by anyone outside the family because a name had to be respected, because a name was like the soul of a person but also the destiny of a person, he said.”
“...and remembers something his mother said to him one day, she said that angels never know if they are alive or not, that angels forget if they live among the living or among the dead,”
“Also, writing is slower and reading is slower, but at the same time listening is slower than looking, which is a contradiction that cannot be explained.”
Important notes
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