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 Sidewalks, Faces in the Crowd, The Story of My Teeth, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, 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 Yorker, 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.
In Valeria Luiselli's fiercly imaginative novel, a mother and a father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, through Virginia, to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas, their bonds begin to fray: a fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. Through songs and maps and a Polaroid camera's lens, the children try to make sense of both their family's crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but being detained—or getting lost in the desert along the way. A breathtaking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.
At the end of Valeria Luiselli's novel Lost Children Archive, a boy leaves his sister a voice recording. Whether intentional or not, this decision—to leave his voice behind—is reminiscent of the Greek myth of Echo, an Oread cursed by the goddess Hera to only repeat the last words she heard. Once Echo's voice was stripped away, her source of power was gone. Yet, once Echo dies, the only thing she is able to leave behind is her voice, suggesting that all echoes we hear are Echo's legacy. Thus, indirectly, Echo's voice becomes her power again, similarly to how the boy's voice recording also gives him power back despite being powerless in a familial situation.
In his voice recording, the boy draws a parallel to his and his sister's experience in the desert to what is happening to them currently as their family is separating. Near the end, the boy demands of his sister that "you have to always remember how, for a while, I lost you and you lost me but we found each other again" (350). This statement is only a whisper of what actually went down in the desert once the boy realized he was missing his sister. The statement is missing the animal panic, the fear, the horror at losing her. Yet is is this neutral and nearly unemotional statement that allows the boy to connect that desert experience to the upcoming separation of their family. Knowing that the girl is leaving in the morning, he is also telling her that in this upcoming separation, they will be lost from one another, but that they will find each other again—just like they did in the desert. Realizing how the two situations relate—being lost from his sister in the desert, and now being separated from her due to the family dissolution—he ends his recording with, "You might feel lost one day, but you have to remember that you're not, because you and I will find each other again" (350). The boy uses the two situations as an echo of one another, so that his sister will remember that they survived a separate once before, so that they can survive another one and find each other again.
In a powerless situation the boy finds power in his previous experience with his sister. As a child, he recognizes that his only power is reuniting with his sister later, finding his sister like he did in the desert. He finds that power once he tells the story to his sister, demanding that she remember as a way to also command himself not to forget.
Leaving behind his childhood voice to his sister is also another form of power that he does not fully recognize within the recording itself. Once the boy is able to give his sister and himself a call to action to find one another later in life, he is able to regain power over the separation of their parents. While the adults can control who goes with whom at the moment, they will not be able to control the boy and girl later in life, when they finally have the ability to seek one another out. The also gives this power to his sister. By leaving behind his voice and their story (via the Polaroids), the boy is able to leave an echo of their experience together behind. His telling their story to his sister in this way gives the girl power back over her body. She is powerless in a child's body and mind that would let her forget her experiences. She regains agency over her story when her brother leaves their story behind with her, in a very raw, unbiased form. Once the girl is old enough to make choices for herself, she has the agency to either find her brother again or maintain the separation.
Like Echo, the boy's legacy to his sister is his voice. As the children grow up, the boy's childhood voice will become an echo of the person he was, and the things he says will also just remain an echo of what actually happened to them. Despite the inevitable dissolution of the family, the boy and the girl have the power in the end, just like how Echo regained power through the everlasting nature of her voice.
*This response can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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