4.5 stars. Wonderful in so many ways - beautifully written, complex construction, references to the larger literary landscape. I know it is nerdy, but I find it deeply satisfying when an author is able to subtly yet recognizably reference the larger literary landscape - particularly in a novel not about the white men of our cannon.

The novel takes a family falling apart on a road trip and looks at unaccompanied children crossing the border and Native American history. It's a sometimes messy intersection of stories, but feels manageable and, at times, breathtaking.

I like the double meaning of the title - the archives in the book and also the book itself as an archive.

I really wanted to like this book but quite frankly, I didn't.

It's a shame because there is some potential for greatness here. The writing is not poor quality in itself and there were some parts where I was blown away by a single sentence due to the sheer perfection of its nuance and wordplay.

But unfortunately where plot and pacing are concerned, this book left me seriously wanting. For 385 looooong pages. My reading preferences are either story-driven or character-driven books, and this was neither.

If I were to sum up Lost Children Archive in a word it would be: fucking pretentious. I know that's two words but I don't care because that's how annoyed I was by this book. It's a novel which tries to be about several different things at once and ends up doing none of them justice. The tragic journey of immigrant children in the US, the slow dissolution of a marriage, the exploration of Native American culture and the examination of the "great American road trip" all add to the thematic confusion as each one attempts to be a backdrop to the increasingly grating philosophical angst of the main protagonist/narrator.

It became extremely hard to be motivated to pick this book up when I realised that all I would be getting from it is yet more pompous social commentary through the lens of photography/soundscaping/music/literature and the never-ceasing name-dropping of people in those fields. I kept waiting for the plot to kick in but alas the book just continues in this way, perpetually drowning under the weight of its own metaphor.

It does get slightly more palatable after the switch of narrator, but not enough to be promoted to 3 stars. Also, it takes a special kind of arrogance to write a whole chapter without any full stops and barely any dialogue (unpunctuated, of course), even taking into account whose POV it is at the time. I felt like my brain had collapsed from lack of oxygen by the end of it.

Not for me this one.

Fascinerende stijl en input van Luiselli, poëtisch geschreven en ontroerend hoe uiteindelijk de verhaallijnen bij elkaar worden gebracht. Fantastisch boek!

Fascinating, compelling and beautifully written but I could only skim the last 20% as I just found it too disturbing. Probably me. I liked the story itself but not so much the book within a book. This would have been at least a 4 without that. I’m sure others will find thus book brilliant. I just found it incredibly sad, especially that last 20%.

This is a quiet, timely, inventive book that sneaks up on you (or at least it did on me). The story of a family driving cross country while the parents' marriage falls apart and immigrant children flee their homelands and come to the US border, only to be imprisoned or sent home, the book meanders at times, tells stories, gets into the mother's and son's heads, makes use of photos, inventories of boxes brought on the trip, a book called "Elegies for Lost Children" and ends up in a surprisingly moving place by the end. Beautiful writing that forced me to slow down and take it all in.

La première partie m'a semblée parfois longue, un récit de voyage familial qui mène probablement à une rupture. Une écriture de l'intime assez jolie. Difficile de voir la fiction dans cette partie d'ailleurs.
Puis la seconde partie lue d'une traite de 23h à 1:30. Puissante, le coeur battant. Sûrement que la lenteur de la première partie accentue les sentiments de la deuxième. Très beau livre en tout cas !