Lost Children Archive

Lost Children Archive is filled with both literal and figurative echoes. Choose at least two different kinds of “echoes” and compare their evolutions throughout Lost Children Archive. Considering these echoes, how do you interpret the family’s return to Echo Canyon?

From the mother’s insistence on using paper maps (versus GPS) to the boy’s hand-drawn route to the Xs (which he believes represent Manuela’s daughters), maps are a reoccurring motif throughout Lost Children Archive. How does Luiselli use these different images of maps (and different kinds of mapping) to comment on themes of loss and being lost?

The mother narrator of Lost Children Archive spends much of the novel reading, underlining quotes, and seeking resonances with her own experience in others’ words. Choose at least three different texts she quotes from and analyze the significance of these texts within the novel’s thematic development.

In addition to examining texts that resonate with the mother narrator’s experiences (and her imagination of others’ experiences), Lost Children Archive gestures to numerous quotes and texts without overtly explaining their connection to the novel. Luiselli thereby relies on the reader to possess previous knowledge of these texts, to conduct research independently from their reading, or to make assumptions based on very little information. In your opinion, why does Luiselli give so much responsibility to the reader? How does this choice shape your experience and perception of the novel?

At numerous intervals throughout Lost Children Archive, the mother narrator questions the efficacy of her migrant stories sound project. In your opinion, how does the novel respond to the issue of making “art with someone else’s suffering” (79), both in terms of the narrator’s fictional sound project and Luiselli’s construction of this fiction? Do you think the novel responds to this issue in a satisfying way? Why or why not?

The chapter entitled “Echo Canyon” is narrated in a single, unbroken, run-on sentence. Why do you think Luiselli decided to write this chapter as one sentence?

How do you interpret the boy’s decision to become “both a documentarian and a documentarist” (349)? How (and to what end) does the boy perform both of these roles? Do the Polaroid photos at the back of the book enhance your understanding of his perspective? How do his documents converse with the other photos, notes, and ephemera from the archive boxes? What does his dual performance of “documentarian and documentarist” signify in light of the ways he mirrors his biological father and the girl mirrors her biological mother?

As a documentarian, the mother narrator of Lost Children Archive is very invested in examining and defamiliarizing language and its usage, including the words refugee, illegal, migrant, alien, removal, and deportation. Choose at least three different words she analyzes throughout the novel. How does her analysis change and progress with her experiences, her research, and her encounters? How does this research and experience allow her (and force her) to retranslate these words? How does this retranslation process correspond with her work as a translator at the federal immigration court and a translator of sounds into soundscapes?