ANGLES OF EXPERIENCE

In all of her writing, including five books, most recently the novel Lost Children Archive, Valeria Luiselli grapples with enormous questions about immigration, incarceration, and the invented spaces of language and identity, not by dwelling on the answers but by telling stories as a way to better ask the questions.

WE EXPECT so much of writers. Theirs is a complicated responsibility. They must be sophisticated yet grounded; they should inspire readers to action yet remain neutral as artists. Valeria Luiselli is acutely aware of these boundaries, but within that understanding she is constantly interrogating its limits. She has experienced firsthand the benefits of living life without borders. Born in Mexico City in 1983, Luiselli has lived in South Africa, Costa Rica, South Korea, India, Spain, and elsewhere; she now lives in New York City. As a writer she doesn’t confine herself to fiction or nonfiction but instead allows the passion of her interests to guide her note-taking and writing. The genre makes itself known only after she has considered her subject from a variety of angles. Her first books, the novel Los ingrávidos and the essay collection Papeles Falsos, were released in 2012 by the Mexican publisher Sexto Piso. Word of this bright new talent spread quickly, and Granta Books published the first English translations, by Christina MacSweeney, of Faces in the Crowd and Sidewalks in the U.K. in 2012 and 2013, respectively. In 2014, the year Coffee House Press published U.S. editions of both titles, Luiselli was named one of the National Book Foundation’s Five Under Thirty-Five. Faces in the Crowd went on to win the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times. A year later, her innovative novel The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press), also translated by MacSweeney, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

as well as the Best Translated Book Award, going on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction as well as the Metropolis Azul Prize in Canada. As she continued to work on her books, Luiselli contributed to the New York Times, Granta, the New Yorker, McSweeney’s and Freeman’s. It was John Freeman’s self-titled journal in which she published the essay that would become Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017). Structured around the questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and the Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

Her new book, Lost Children Archive, published in February by Knopf, is a dazzling and expansive novel, and the first book she has written in English. At its heart is a uniquely American family, two parents and two kids, driving from New York to Arizona, to Apacheria, the place the Apache people once called home. Neither the characters’ names nor their ethnicity are ever revealed, but the reader comes to understand how deeply they love one another and how desperately they want to reconcile the problems that threaten the happy serenity of their home. As the road trip begins, both parents face the question of whether or not their marriage will survive their professional ambitions. While the husband hopes to remain out West to study the history and legacy of the Apaches, the wife—inspired by her search for two specific children who are stuck in detention at the border—wants to return to New York, where she will document the migrant crisis as it affects young people trapped in the legal system. Try as they may to maintain a spirit of adventure and joy in their travels, the gravity of the parents’ work and its toll on their relationship affects the whole family, culminating in the children’s hope to find the two lost children and, perhaps, save their own family. This humane work retains the experimental genius of Luiselli’s other books but marks the end of one chapter of her partnership with Coffee House Press and the beginning of another.

“That’s part of our narrative at Coffee House. It wasn’t a question of hard feelings,” says Chris Fischbach, publisher of Coffee House Press, about Luiselli’s move to Knopf. And, indeed, a number of authors published early on in their careers by the independent publisher based in Minneapolis have moved on to larger houses for subsequent books— Eimear McBride, T. Geronimo Johnson, and Ben Lerner among them. But Luiselli remains connected to the publisher: In January it was announced that she will become a contributing editor of Coffee House. “I realized that she’d always served as kind of an adviser to the press on authors and I thought, ‘Why not make that a more formal role,’” says Fischbach. “Valeria is a really good match for our editorial sensibility.”

At Knopf, Luiselli worked with vice president and editorial director Robin Desser, a relationship that Luiselli notes was the most collaborative of her career to date. “I had admired the work of Valeria Luiselli for many years, since reading The Story of My Teeth,” says Desser. “Here was a writer staking out new literary territory, who had something urgent to tell us. I had been hoping that any book by Valeria Luiselli might land on my desk at Knopf, and when the manuscript of Lost Children Archive arrived from Nicole Aragi, I read it overnight. I was excited beyond

my expectations. Though Lost Children Archive had all the formal inventiveness, pure creativity, political engagement, and intellectual richness of Valeria’s prior work, this novel’s timely subject and wide scope, its emotional acuity, its piercing beauty of language and imagery struck me as new even for Valeria.”

In addition to her work as a contributing editor for Coffee House, Luiselli is also a grantee of the Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund, an organization that supports artists in their efforts to solve the problem of mass incarceration. Reflecting upon the mission of the fellowship, Luiselli says, “I’m writing, thinking, and reading a lot about mass incarceration but trying to expand the notion of mass incarceration to immigration detention spaces because for some weird reason, in mainstream media and in general opinion, immigration detention and mass incarceration are two separate things, but they are absolutely the same thing.” In the fall she will begin teaching courses at Bard College, where she was recently appointed writer in residence. She also teaches a creative writing workshop with her niece, at an immigration detention center in New York, to mostly Guatemalan children for whom Spanish is their second language.

It is fitting that Luiselli should, despite her busy literary career, remain committed to the stories of children. In Lost Children Archive she writes, “Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don’t fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.” In search of that clarity, Luiselli works seamlessly

in both fiction and nonfiction, grappling with enormous humanitarian questions regarding immigration and incarceration while also recognizing the persistent need to pursue the intimate concerns of devotion and both biological and chosen families. Her work is grounded in a deep commitment to storytelling—both through listening to others and finding one’s own voice.

What struck me deeply about Lost

Children Archive is the way in which you situate the larger problem of speaking for migrant children and marginalized people through the challenges of communication within one family. How did you first approach these issues?

One of the things that was perhaps the seed was to try to understand how interaction between children and parents works and how children’s worlds can sweep over the adult world, too. Even though children’s capacity to understand or engage with reality is often underestimated by parents, I wanted to think about how political reality and parents’ own problems and qualms affect children and their narratives and what it does to the electricity and atmosphere of a house or, in this instance, a car. It’s a road novel, but it’s not a road novel. It’s also a descent into an inferno for the kids as they travel; it plays out on a different layer of consciousness, which is very much the Latin American tradition of thinking about journeying and traveling. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is all about that. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night is an excellent example of that in the French tradition as well.

You had taken notes for this book for four to five years. What was the experience of amassing notes and thinking about the novel for so long like?

I think I have seventeen or eighteen journals of notes for this novel. It’s kind of insane. I’d never taken that many notes for a novel. But this required a lot of thinking, more than anything else I’ve worked on.

And you were simultaneously working on Tell Me How It Ends, right?

At some point they were actually part of the same project. The essay was there, and then I started using the novel as a vessel for spewing the political rage I was feeling, the frustration. I was just starting to work in court as a translator, assisting young people who required help as they pressed their legal cases for asylum, and starting to think about how to tell the story of this generation of kids who are migrating by themselves in a way that was not trivializing or parasitic.

Because it’s not your story to tell.

It’s not my story to tell. I was thinking about where to stand and what the narrative distance had to be. I also wanted to tell that story to denounce what I was seeing happen in immigration court. The situation had, by then, [dropped] out of the headlines. And John Freeman kept telling me, “You have to write about this. You have to write about this,” and I kept saying, “No, no, no. I can’t. I’m too angry to write properly. I’m trying to do it in the novel, but it’s not working. I don’t understand enough.” I didn’t and still don’t understand enough about immigration law, but I [understand] much more now.

How exactly did he persuade you?

The way editors do! E-mail, conversation, breaking you down. Like any good editor he realized that I couldn’t speak about anything except that. Or that if he pushed me just a little bit, I’d start.

He’d gotten you past the hump of feeling that your lack of mastery of the law was an obstacle. Too often we grant authority to figures like lawyers instead of giving weight to the multitude of people who engage in this issue.

Totally. There are different angles of experience. When I finally decided that I had to write Tell Me How It Ends as an essay, I was able to completely separate

that from [the novel] and then go back to the novel with a much…I don’t know—I wasn’t feeling any lighter, but I could go back to fiction and think of the work and not allow my activist fibers to get in the way. I feel that fiction should not be led by a political agenda that’s too clear because then it becomes propaganda. You become preachy. That’s what was happening with the novel. I wasn’t on this moral high ground preaching, but I was trying to use the work as a platform.

What were you reading at the time that influenced you?

One thing that influenced me profoundly during those years was reading László Krasznahorkai, whose prose changed the way my eyes work. He’s probably the greatest writer alive, together with Anne Carson. I’m always reading Anne Carson. There are people I’m always rereading so they’re always an influence. [Krasznahorkai] has several books where a sentence extends five pages, these long sentences where there are ripples in time. He is a master. I don’t know how he manages it. It’s like your eyes have to get retrained in a muscular way.

You mention in the Acknowledgments that you listened to Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis incessantly while writing the novel. Did it give you the space to clear your head?

To write I have to go into a space or a rhythm that I find when I swim or while listening to someone like Philip Glass. It allows me to reconnect on a neurological level. I can’t really explain it. I’m conditioned now so that if I hear Philip Glass, I wonder, “Where are these characters?” This was a novel that created an intense grief when I finished. I wrote it mostly at night, as I did my other books. I can’t do it anymore, but since I was fourteen years old I was only able to work at night. I would sit every night from nine until very, very late, and when I finished I would spend seven hours of my day intensely inside this world, often thinking of solutions to little plot problems that I had. I never really think about plot.

You’re not the kind of writer who is going to have a plotted-out structure.

I have no idea about any of those things. Even when I start I don’t know where it will end. Otherwise I wouldn’t write.

You’re writing to figure it out.

Exactly.

For you, fiction is a way of coming to terms with things or grappling with a problem.

And not solving it, not answering any questions, but at least understanding how to phrase those questions. And to better understand it in a very classical, essayistic mode of circling around a problem—like the idea of essaying as attempting or circling something without necessarily attacking it directly but always spiraling inwards toward something.

That gets back to this idea of allowing different people to speak rather than just expecting one person or thing to provide all the truth. You’re allowing it to evolve on its own without having one authoritative voice.

That’s why there’s a refracting of voices in the novel. There’s the woman narrator, the kids, and then there’s also a third-person narrative that’s threaded, in a way—it’s not a final version of anything. It’s also questionable, no? Who’s actually writing that, telling that? It threads so tightly into the reality of the novel that the reader [comes to see it as] an artifact. I don’t have to believe that it’s a book; it’s an artifact. I think fiction should not be scared to reveal itself as artifact.

I love that there is such an ambiguity about who the characters are, even their names, so that readers can map themselves into it as well.

It’s funny—it’s something that people have asked me about a lot. In my first

novel, there are no names either. It’s not about depersonalizing; it’s a way of documenting without too much of the artifice of fiction. In this case I think it also works as a tool to put everyone in the novel on exactly the same plane. Often protagonists have names, and everyone else is a secondary character. In narratives like this one, that could be very dangerous as well. Here, no characters have names until they’re revealed.

You name writers and artists throughout the book.

And the names of people in the migrant mortality reports. I wonder if [readers] skip over that because it’s a report with numbers and coordinates. I had to read them aloud for the first time for the audiobook. I’d never actually sat with this in that way, and it was powerful and horrible. I had to gather myself to not break as I was reading them aloud.

I had to go back and reread them because on one level, it’s like looking at a piece of art by Barbara Kruger that exists as typeface, but then you realize you need to absorb what’s being said to see if this reveals something later in the book. So I went back to read how they died, how they were found, what state the bodies were in.

That kind of thing interests me: When do we see ourselves reading? In which instances, particularly in front of a piece, do we wonder, “Oh, how am I doing this?” That’s what I like about László Krasznahorkai: the kind of consciousness brought back to your own face, eyes, mind. A physical experience and questioning of how we read. Anatomically, emotionally, intellectually: How do we place ourselves in front of something? So having different bits and pieces of things in the novel—not just straightforward text but an image, the pictures at the end, the things in the archival boxes throughout the book, and particularly the migrant mortality reports—forces us as readers, I think, to not only stand differently, but to stop and wonder, “How do I read this?”

So the interruptions work as this way of creating a more active form of reading. It’s intentionally pulling you in, forcing you to stop and interrogate the work. Because if this was just a straightforward four-hundred-page family saga, it would be a different experience of reading. You would let it sweep over you.

And it would sell 100,000 more copies!

I think your stylistic interruptions separate your work from others. Even in Sidewalks, just setting subject headings into the work spurred me to stop and ask, “What is this signaling to me?” You do that in Lost

Children Archive as well.

In all the books, maybe, except for Tell Me How It Ends, which is a completely different book. That’s a book with an intention. It’s the only book I’ve written in which I wanted to report on a subject, so there’s less of that. It’s not about bringing attention to the architecture of the book in order to question things or to bring the reader’s mind to question things and their way of reading. It’s the opposite of that. It draws outward, but here it’s a different thing. That’s why I still believe in the hybrid nature of writing; thinking in terms of genre is not so fertile.

Genre forces you to conform to an idea instead of allowing the story to tell the story it should tell, the truth that should rise to the surface rather than the didactic idea of what you superimpose upon things.

Exactly—you start to conform to things like plot or convention.

Fiction can change to be something other than escapism.

People always say the novel is dead. Who knows, but if it is the case, moments of crisis for any art form or any convention are always good. If that’s the case, it will force us to think of different ways of approaching, different ways of writing.