2021: Lost Children Archive

Had high hopes for this book as my first read of 2021 but left feeling a little underwhelmed and scattered. It was so powerful and evocative, but discontinuous with many interweaving, alternative narratives. 

Perhaps it was the best way Luiselli thought to depict (and honour) her missing subject. Fragments of text forms narrated by different characters - about the lost children she hoped to find, her struggle to keep both her children close, the elegies of lost children retold through her novel-within-a-novel. I wish she switched voices more convincingly though (it's impossible to imagine a 10 year old child thinking such mature, sophisticated thoughts that sound similar to what his mother had narrated a few pages back!) and that it wasn't such a predictable buildup to both her children eventually wandering off. 

All this aside, Luiselli's prose is undeniably, achingly beautiful. She writes about how the mother for a long time has worried about what to tell her children about the world. But now - and this is my favourite paragraph in the book - she realises that little by little, "his own mind has arranged all the chaos around us into a world... The only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges: this is how you cut your own nails... 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. 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 perhaps make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful."