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A review by elizanderson1066
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
2.0
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.
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.