This is the third book by Valeria Luiselli I have read (and maybe her third, I think). It’s a novel that was recently nominated for the Booker Prize, and it’s her first book written in English. This is the audiobook, a fact I don’t always mention in my reviews, and that plays an important role in my thinking on this book as this is a novel about language (intended versus understood meanings of language). The audiobook is read by Valeria Luiselli and having her slightly accented English be the defining voice of this book is really rewarding because the book is about a family travelling across the United States from New York to Arizona/New Mexico listening to audiobooks. That’s not the only connection: the husband and wife are book audio documentary creators (they use the terms documentarian for the husband–story telling and narrative–and documentarist for the wife–anthropology and genealogy), and the novel is a combination of both forms of audio record keeping. It’s also interesting to have the author narrate most of this novel because there’s commentary on audiobooks (an actor performing versus a reader reading), and because the novel has a kind of non-idiomatic American English (educated, knowledgeable, but not native speaking) lexicography to it.
So the novel is about a family relocating to the southwest United States in order for the husband (not an American) to conduct research for an audio project on the Apache and their various leaders. As a contingency of her own work as a documentarist of languages in New York city and her work as a translator and legal advocate for refugee and immigrants in New York, the wife decides to document the “lost children” of the border (this novel predates our contemporary use of “separated families” as a term, but is both about this and about the children who are deported quickly).
The novel though is mostly about the question of the role of the witness of history in the telling of history, and subsequently the role of novelist in this equation. Like her previous novel, this novel is nearly documetarian in nature, but with clear narrative and plot changes to suit the needs of the story. It’s an incredibly rich and often frustrating novel, that shows the importance of narrative, and is a brilliant achievement in a lot of ways.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525520619/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0)