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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
WINNER OF THE FOLIO PRIZE
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE
One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
A Best Book of 2019: Entertainment Weekly; TIME; NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Washington Post; GQ; The Guardian; Chicago Tribune; Dallas Morning News; and the New York Public Library
"The novel truly becomes novel again in Luiselli's hands--electric, elastic, alluring, new." --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
A fiercely imaginative new novel about a family whose road trip across America collides with an immigration crisis at the southwestern border--an indelible journey told with breathtaking imagery, spare lyricism, and profound humanity.
A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.
Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.
In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way.
As the family drives--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure--both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.
Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.
Author Notes
Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney's, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Luiselli's powerful, eloquent novel begins with a family embarking on a road trip and culminates in an indictment of America's immigration system. An unnamed husband and wife drive, with their children in the backseat, from New York City to Arizona, he seeking to record remnants of Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apache, she hoping to locate two Mexican girls last seen awaiting deportation at a detention center. The husband recounts for the 10-year-old son and five-year-old daughter stories about a legendary band of Apache children. The wife explains how immigrant children become separated from parents, losing their way and sometimes their lives. Husband, wife, son, and daughter nickname themselves Cochise, Lucky Arrow, Swift Feather, and Memphis, respectively. When Swift Feather and Memphis go off alone, they become lost, then separated, then intermingled with the Apache and immigrant children, both imagined and all too real. As their parents frantically search, Memphis trades Swift Feather's map, compass, flashlight, binoculars, and Swiss Army knife for a bow and arrow, leaving them with only their father's stories about the area to guide them. Juxtaposing rich poetic prose with direct storytelling and brutal reality and alternating narratives with photos, documents, poems, maps, and music, Luiselli explores what holds a family and society together and what pulls them apart. Echoing themes from previous works (such as Tell Me How It Ends), Luiselli demonstrates how callousness toward other cultures erodes our own. Her superb novel makes a devastating case for compassion by documenting the tragic shortcomings of the immigration process. 31 photos. 75,000-copy announced first printing. (Feb.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* No stranger to inventive storytelling and the Mexican-American borderlands, Luiselli (The Story of My Teeth, 2015) launches this ultimately harrowing novel with an innocuous enough premise. An unnamed couple and their children embark on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Arizona. Husband and wife both work as audio recording artists, dedicated to capturing the soundscapes of everyday life. Upon their arrival, he plans to investigate the native Apache people who used to populate the Southwest, and she has promised to find a friend's daughters who have been arrested at the border. When the family arrives at their destination, however, the overwhelming scale of the migrant crisis redirects their efforts, and the children eventually lose themselves in the strange, uncertain terrain. As husband and wife rush to recover their own offspring, stories of Latin American asylum seekers and the disappeared Apaches overlap and converge, creating a poignant portrait of current events. Intense and keenly timely, Luiselli's latest work is perhaps her most politically relevant, and themes of translation and migration resonate, making it one of few novels that fully and powerfully convey the urgency of this unsettling situation.--Diego Báez Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LAST SUMmer, when the American government separated thousands of migrant children from their parents - detaining them far apart and sometimes losing track of children - the outcry was visceral, and full-throated enough to provoke a stampede of storytelling by activists and journalists. There seemed to be an imperative, both professional and moral, to pay particular attention to the experiences of the children. There was a duty to humanize them, to counter political language such as "illegal alien." But what such stories really hope to do is humanize their readers, listeners, spectators: the desensitized consumers of news. The reporting aims to make us see beyond legal, national or partisan labels into the hearts of migrants, to awaken us to empathy. Which of us who has loved a child wouldn't be moved by the evocative details of innocence snagged on the jagged fences of adult circumstance? This newspaper, for one, told of the mooing that resonated at bedtime through a converted Walmart superstore in Texas where 1,500 boys, despite being detained, could still make animal noises in a conspiracy of silliness and take refuge in pretending together. The novel "Lost Children Archive" unfolds against this very backdrop of crisis: of children crossing borders, facing death, being detained, being deported unaccompanied by their guardians. The novel follows a couple and their two children (all unnamed) from previous marriages, a 5year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, on a road trip from New York City to the Mexican border. There the wife, the novel's narrator, intends to work on a journalistic piece about the "removals" of child migrants by the United States Border Patrol, and the husband on a sound project about the 19th-century "removals" of Apaches, the last Native Americans to surrender to American soldiers. Valeria Luiselli charts the couple's intellectual concerns and political commitments (and her own) in ruminative, layered prose that deliberately digresses more than it progresses, with a riffing, essayistic logic, subtitles that become refrains, and minimal plot. The couple's marriage is on the brink of collapse, and for the first half of the novel their physical journey is mirrored by an emotional circling, back to and around the memories of when they first found each other and moved in together as a family. As they drive southwest, they listen to radio reports about migrant children in trouble, and the wife learns that the daughters of a woman she knew through her daughter's school, and once helped as a volunteer interpreter, have somehow gone missing during deportation. Meanwhile, the wife is reading aloud (sometimes to her children, sometimes into her recorder) a translation of an Italian novel, "Elegies for Lost Children," about unaccompanied children riding atop trains to an unnamed country. Luiselli alludes to and cannibalizes many real books, some canonical, some obscure, in "Lost Children Archive," but this Italian novel is a work of her own making. Its true author is not the fictional Ella Camposanto but Luiselli herself. She interweaves this invented book with her own so that the two texts and the two journeys - one by car, meandering and almost desultory; the other speeding forward with the almost locomotive propulsion of suspenseful fiction - seem on their way to a collision. A diplomat's daughter born in Mexico and raised across borders and languages, Luiselli has herself been preoccupied, since her own 2014 family journey to the border, with the tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children who each year climb aboard a northbound freight train called La Bestia, or "the beast," seeking asylum. Her previous book, a nonfiction work called "Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Lorty Questions," arose from her interviews with migrant children as a volunteer court interpreter in New York City. In "Lost Children Archive," her fifth book (her first novel to be written in English), she's as preoccupied with her doubts over whether and how to tell their stories as she is with telling them as urgently as their tragic situation demands. Of course, a novel's purpose and potential are different from those of a newspaper article or a radio spot. Books that immerse us in the internal and external deserts unaccompanied child migrants must cross - books that mirror the characters, trajectory and terrain of Luiselli's imaginary text-within-a-text - already exist. Among several works of narrative nonfiction about their plight is the journalist Sonia Nazario's "Enrique's Journey," which shadows a Honduran boy as he rides the rails to reunite with his mother in the United States. There's also poetry from a first-person perspective: "Unaccompanied," by Javier Zamora, who fled El Salvador atop trains at the age of 9. Other works in English, all factual, have kicked open the doors of this particular experience. WHAT PERHAPS SETS A NOVEL APART from these other genres is the childlike pleasure it can take in pure play, in the imaginative pact of treating the artifice of the story as lived reality. And there is joy in make-believe in "Lost Children Archive," which gains much of its wry charisma from the playacting of its precocious child characters - both those riding atop trains and those riding in cars. At one point in "Elegies," thumps and shouts from the illicit rooftop cargo of children ricochet down the length of a train, as infectious as the mooing in that former Walmart. But rather than inviting her readers to suspend disbelief, as children do, Luiselli instead encourages us to see the artifice as artifice, even to be wary of it. Can she, as an adult and a relatively privileged one, possibly capture the reality of these children, in fiction or nonfiction? The novel's narrator, brooding over her proposed oral histories of asylumseeking children, doubts that she can or should ever get as close to her sources as her husband gets to buzzing insects with his mic. She questions the ethics of exploiting the children's lives as "material for media consumption": "Why? What for?" she asks. "So that others can listen to them and feel - pity? Feel - rage? And then do what? No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning." But what might one do after reading a novel that stirs pity and rage? Acutely sensitive to these misgivings, Luiselli has delivered a madly allusive, self-reflexive, experimental novel, one that is as much about storytellers and storytelling as it is about lost children. Play she in fact can, and does: with structure, cleverly, inventively. Her previous work won accolades for its risk-taking with form. "Tell Me How It Ends" was structured as responses to the questionnaire on the immigration court's intake form. "Lost Children Archive" takes the highly complex shape of an archive. It contains three recognizable narratives: (1) the wife's eddying first-person musings subdivided into recurring headings such as "Allegory," "Reverberations," "Climax" and "Histories"; (2) transcriptions of recordings the boy has made for his little sister to remember the desert adventure that unfolds when, noting the attention their mother pays to lost children, they purposely get lost themselves; and (3) the third-person "Elegies" threaded throughout as either the wife or the boy reads them into the recorder. Slipped in among these accounts are the boy's Polaroids of people and places along their journey; a humanitarian group's map pinpointing migrant deaths in the desert; mortality reports identifying migrant remains; a photograph of a clunky cellphone, toothpaste and a pen recovered in Pima County, Ariz.; a map the boy has drawn to show his parents their runaway path; an image of Apache prisoners being transported east by train in 1886; a 1910 poster seeking guardians out west for homeless children in New York City; a photograph of these orphans sent west by rail and catalogs of the seven storage boxes the family carries on their trip. The contents include a bibliography for theorizing about archives, maps of the Southwest and a novella entitled "The Children's Crusade" about a legendary 13th-century child migration from Europe to the Holy Land, a real book cited as the inspiration for "Elegies for Lost Children." Add to all this the husband's stories of a band of Apache children called the Eagle Warriors and there are four layers of historical lost children that Luiselli connects to the contemporary ones in her novel. Given her interest in echoes of past injustice, her archival structure makes sense. Anything, any enclosure for the material remnants of the lives of others, can be an archive. Even the floor of the Sonoran Desert, where migrants dead and alive have left pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Red Bull cans and bottles of water painted black to escape notice at night. While stories soothe with their imposed semblance of order, archives exhaust with the often incomprehensible chaos of what's been left behind. It's no coincidence that the subheadings "Chaos" and "Order" recur in the book. Or that a novel so concerned with the arbitrary, impossible nature of storytelling should embrace archives, with their shapeless, indeterminate character, as its scaffolding. This highly conceptual, cerebral approach is rich but occasionally frustrating as it carries nested within it the potential to stir pity and rage. Luiselli holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia, and "Lost Children Archive" is a virtuosic, erudite performance, referring back to and repurposing the words and strategies of modernist writers like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, metafictional tricksters like Vladimir Nabokov and masters of the difficult, experimental and hyperallusive like James Joyce. Luiselli's significant set of references also includes the David Bowie song "Space Oddity," Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and "Lord of the Flies," William Golding's dystopian classic about children running wild in the absence of adults. Her novel bears rereading, to reveal pleasing ironies (the boy loses the "little red book about lost children" on a train) and stylistic sleights of hand (that little red book begins in much the same way as "Lost Children" itself). In Luiselli's most thrilling section, the children from the fake book meet those from the actual book in a derelict train car in the desert, their voices merging as they walk toward one another, the stream of consciousness of one band collapsing into that of the other. The section "Echo Canyon" consists of one mounting, rhythmic, delirious and possibly hallucinatory feat of a sentence spanning 20 pages. It is reminiscent of Molly Bloom's epic soliloquy in Joyce's "Ulysses." The final irony might be that with "Lost Children Archive," Luiselli has indeed written the sort of novel about unaccompanied children that she seems to resist: the bookwithin-the-book she ascribes to Camposanto. Its metaphors are wrought with devastating precision. In a fable-like scene set in a train yard where swindlers, vendors and entertainers mill, to help or exploit the migrants, Luiselli/Camposanto describes one fortuneteller as "a scrotumfaced woman, neck speckled with warts and stray hair, and eyes like a welcome mat on which too many shoes had been wiped." The elegies, foreshadowing the loss of a boy on a train, are riveting. They achieve a lyrical immediacy that makes us feel for those children atop the train. The brilliance of the writing stirs rage and pity. It humanizes us. Play Luiselli in fact can, and does: with structure, cleverly, inventively. GAIUTRA Bahadur has spent time in archives, for her book "Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture," and on the migrant trail in Arizona's Sonoran Desert while reporting for The Nation in 2010.
Guardian Review
A New York family takes a road trip south, in this rigorous and beguiling novel about child migrants on the US-Mexico border that has been longlisted for the Women's prize A family of four, in which neither child is child to both parents, leaves New York and drives towards the borderlands of Arizona. In the back of the car, along with the usual luggage, are seven boxes. Those belonging to the adults contain books and documents, CDs and newspaper cuttings. Those belonging to the children, aged five and 10, are initially empty but fill up over the course of the journey with images and transcriptions of sounds, traces of their experiences along the way. The novel is like those boxes. Orderly in arrangement, eccentric in the selection of its contents, it is at once intellectually rigorous and engagingly humane. Into it is crammed an account of love's fade-out, a tender depiction of a pair of children from the point of view of a distracted mother, and a road trip full of allusions to other road trips, from the 13th-century Children's Crusade to those described by Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy. There is also another dreamlike Odyssey -narrative, purportedly written by someone else, that recounts, with much literary quotation, the tribulations of a group of children attempting to cross the Mexican border, and a child's-eye account of a voyage into a kind of outer space or perhaps outer time, in which fictionalised fact and childish fantasy merge with a riff on David Bowie's "Space Oddity". Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico but has lived most of her life in the United States. She is bilingual, but this is her first book written in English; it has been longlisted for the Women's prize. We know from her previous non-fiction book Tell Me How It Ends that she, like the woman in this novel, has been working to help some of the undocumented children entering, or attempting to enter, the US from Mexico and points south. That book was her polemic. In this novel she draws on the same material to do something more imaginative, more intimate, and stranger. Early one morning, after weeks of days playing word games in the back of the car and nights in motels, the two children run away. If they are lost, thinks the boy, perhaps their mother will begin to care about them as much as she cares about the would-be immigrant children with whose stories she is filling their nightmares. With only the vaguest idea of where they are going, they set off into the desert. Many miles from any railway track, they come across an abandoned train carriage open on both sides, a doorway between different states of being. There the children from the realistic framing narrative (which is made up) encounter four children from the elaborately poetic book-within-the-book (which is factual reportage). As mirage and reality meet, a storm breaks. Can the children be saved? It would seem too far-fetched to be credible, but of course the lost children of the title, the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who do, in reality, attempt to cross these deserts in the hope of finding safe haven, are launched on their journey by relatives or friends hoping for a happy ending every bit as improbable. The man and woman (they have no names) are both makers of audio documentaries. They met when working on a project to record all the languages spoken in New York, a reminder of how that city, and the entire USA, grew by welcoming in outsiders. As their long drive begins they each have new projects. He wants to record aural traces of the Apaches who once populated Arizona (another reminder that all but a few present-day Americans are non-indigenous). She wants to find two Mexican girls, last seen in detention near the border, and also to record or document or remember or understand - her purpose isn't clear to anyone, including herself - the many children who have died crossing the borderlands. They are both seeking to capture something essentially evanescent: sound. The book is full of echoes, both metaphorically in Luiselli's copious use of quotation, and actually. In Echo Canyon the children and their parents hear each other's voices reverberating off the canyon's sides. Luiselli is an ambitious writer. Her previous novels, including The Story of My Teeth , were full of playful formal experiment. Here there are two main narrators, the woman and the boy. Their accounts are dovetailed, each giving a distinct view of identical episodes, each split into short sections with matching subheadings. The boxes packed by the adult characters are filled with books by a cosmopolitan selection of literary heavyweights (Rilke, Pound, Andrzejewski), all of whom resonate in the text. In a virtuoso piece of writing, as the children, delirious with heat and fear, trudge through the desert, Luiselli unleashes a sentence that unfurls over 20 pages, swooping easily from one stream of consciousness to another, and somehow carrying the reader with it. But for all its cleverness, this is also a warm and funny novel, equally droll in its treatment of the precocious, anxious children and its mockery of the solipsistic adults who are so careless of them. It ends with two dozen blurry Polaroids, supposedly taken by the boy, actually supplied by Luiselli and showing a curly haired small girl, her real-life daughter. The effect is mysterious and disconcerting. It recalls WG Sebald's The Emigrants , another book in which fact and fiction seemed to be changing places. Lost Children Archive , in its seriousness and beguiling oddity, is a welcome addition to the Sebaldian genre.
Kirkus Review
A family treks south to the U.S.-Mexico border, bearing tales of broken migrant families all the way down.In her last nonfiction book, Tell Me How It Ends (2017), Luiselli wrote about her work as a translator for Latin American families attempting to enter the U.S. This remarkable, inventive fictional take on the theme captures the anguish of those families through a deliberate piling-up of stories; reading it, you feel yourself slowly coming face to face with a world where masses of children are separated, missing, or dead of exposure in the desert. Luiselli eases into the tale by introducing an unnamed New York couple, both audio documentarians, driving their children, ages 10 and 5, to the Arizona-Mexico border. The father wants to explore the remnants of Apache culture there; the mother, who narrates much of the book, is recording an audio essay on the border crisis and has promised a woman to look into the fates of her two daughters who've been detained. As they drive, they alternate listening to news reports about the border and an audiobook of Lord of the Flies, and the opening sections are thick with literary references and social critique; imagine On the Road rewritten by Maggie Nelson. But the story darkens as they witness the plight firsthand and, later, as the couple's children stumble into their own crisis. There's a slightly bloodless, formal aspect to the novel in the early going: It's structured around "archive boxes" that each character carries in the car's trunk, and a book of elegies the mother reads to the children is made up of variations on works by Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Juan Rulfo, and more. In the current political moment, one might want a less abstruse approach. But as the novel rises to a ferocious climax in a 20-page-long single sentence, Luiselli thunderously, persuasively insists that reckoning with the border will make deep demands of both our intellectual and emotional reserves.A powerful border story, at once intellectual and heartfelt. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A woman with a daughter and a man with a son meet in New York while recording a sound archive of the city; eventually, they marry and become a family. After the project ends, the entire family drives across the country. The father has vague plans to document sounds in the area where the Apaches surrendered; the woman (of Mexican descent, like the author) wishes to research migrant children's experiences crossing the border. Meanwhile, it's evident that the marriage is falling apart. The first half of the story is told in the mother's voice, but this approach is abruptly abandoned for the ten-year-old son's perspective. Interspersed throughout are gripping excerpts from an imagined novel called Elegies of Lost Children, a grim, mythlike account of migrant children riding a freight train to an unnamed border. The novel also includes lists of books and articles, the contents of the family's archive in the trunk of the car, and photographs that document the family's travels, further blurring the border between fact and fiction. VERDICT The shifting sensibility from observer to child to child migrant gradually pulls readers inside the migrants' nightmare journey to create a story that, if fragmented, feels both timely and intelligent. [See Prepub Alert, 8/27/18.]-Reba Leiding, emerita, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Part I: Family Soundscape Relocations "An archive presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies." --Arlette Farge "To leave is to die a little. To arrive is never to arrive." --Migrant prayer Departure Mouths open to the sun, they sleep. Boy and girl, foreheads pearled with sweat, cheeks red and streaked white with dry spit. They occupy the entire space in the back of the car, spread out, limbs offering, heavy and placid. From the copilot seat, I glance back to check on them every so often, then turn around to study the map again. We advance in the slow lava of traffic toward the city limits, across the GW Bridge, and merge onto the interstate. An airplane passes above us and leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky. Behind the wheel, my husband adjusts his hat, dries his forehead with the back of his hand. Family Lexicon I don't know what my husband and I will say to each of our children one day. I'm not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, and which ones we'd shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version--even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because ask is what children do. And we'll need to tell them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We'll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story. The boy turned ten yesterday, just one day before we left New York. We got him good presents. He had specifically said: No toys. The girl is five, and for some weeks has been asking, insistently: When do I turn six? No matter our answer, she'll find it unsatisfactory. So we usually say something ambiguous, like: Soon. In a few months. Before you know it. The girl is my daughter and the boy is my husband's son. I'm a biological mother to one, a stepmother to the other, and a de facto mother in general to both of them. My husband is a father and a stepfather, to each one respectively, but also just a father. The girl and boy are therefore: step-sister, son, stepdaughter, daughter, step-brother, sister, stepson, brother. And because hyphenations and petty nuances complicate the sentences of everyday grammar--the us, the them, the our, the your--as soon as we started living together, when the boy was almost six and the girl still a toddler, we adopted the much simpler possessive adjective our to refer to them two. They became: our children. And sometimes: the boy, the girl. Quickly, the two of them learned the rules of our private grammar, and adopted the generic nouns Mama and Papa, or sometimes simply Ma and Pa. And until now at least, our family lexicon defined the scope and limits of our shared world. Family Plot My husband and I met four years ago, recording a soundscape of New York City. We were part of a large team of people working for the Center for Oral History at Columbia University. The soundscape was meant to sample and collect all the keynotes and the soundmarks that were emblematic of the city: subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministers preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange. But it also attempted to survey and classify all the other sounds that the city produced and that usually went by, as noise, unnoticed: cash registers opening and closing in delis, a script being rehearsed in an empty Broadway theater, underwater currents in the Hudson, Canada geese flocking and shitting over Van Cortlandt Park, swings swinging in Astoria playgrounds, elderly Korean women filing wealthy fingernails on the Upper West Side, a fire breaking through an old tenement building in the Bronx, a passerby yelling a stream of motherfuckers at another. There were journalists, sound artists, geographers, urbanists, writers, historians, acoustemologists, anthropologists, musicians, and even bathymetrists, with those complicated devices called multibeam echo sounders, which were plunged into the waterspaces surrounding the city, measuring the depth and contours of the riverbeds, and who knows what else. Everyone, in couples or small groups, surveyed and sampled wavelengths around the city, like we were documenting the last sounds of an enormous beast. The two of us were paired up and given the task of recording all the languages spoken in the city, over a period of four calendar years. The description of our duties specified: "surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak." We were good at it, it turned out; maybe even really good. We made a perfect team of two. Then, after working together for just a few months, we fell in love--completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who was the rock was and who the bird--and when summer arrived, we decided to move in together. The girl remembers nothing about that period, of course. The boy says he remembers that I was always wearing an old blue cardigan that had lost a couple of buttons and came down to my knees, and that sometimes, when we rode the subway or buses--always with freezing air pouring out--I'd take it off and use it as a blanket to cover him and the girl, and that it smelled of tobacco and was itchy. Moving in together had been a rash decision--messy, confusing, urgent, and as beautiful and real as life feels when you're not thinking about its consequences. We became a tribe. Then came the consequences. We met each other's relatives, got married, started filing joint taxes, became a family. Inventory In the front seats: he and I. In the glove compartment: proof of insurance, registration, owner's manual, and road maps. In the backseat: the two children, their backpacks, a tissue box, and a blue cooler with water bottles and perishable snacks. And in the trunk: a small duffle bag with my Sony PCM-D50 digital voice recorder, headphones, cables, and extra batteries; a large Porta-Brace organizer for his collapsible boom pole, mic, headphones, cables, zeppelin and dead-cat windshield, and the 702T Sound Device. Also: four small suitcases with our clothes, and seven bankers boxes (15" x 12" x 10"), double-thick bottoms and solid lids. Covalence Despite our efforts to keep it all firmly together, there has always been an anxiety around each one's place in the family. We're like those problematic molecules you learn about in chemistry classes, with covalent instead of ionic bonds--or maybe it's the other way around. The boy lost his biological mother at birth, though that topic is never spoken about. My husband delivered the fact to me, in one sentence, early on in our relationship, and I immediately understood that it was not a matter open to further questions. I don't like to be asked about the girl's biological father, either, so the two of us have always kept a respectful pact of silence about those elements of our and our children's pasts. In response to all that, perhaps, the children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They're like anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, but with a touch more narcissism. 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. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we're able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning. Excerpted from Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.