#Valeria Luiselli

[thensson]

Thinking of you, even now

Darling, I Left the House, by Joseph Brodsky || Nickie Zimov || Faces in the Crowd, Valeria Luiselli || Garden of Words, Makoto Shinkai || Love, Alex Dimitrov || This is Not a Love Poem, Caitlyn Siehl

[sicknessinmotion]

I MISS YOU MORE THAN I REMEMBER YOU; ON FATHERS AND THEIR GHOSTS

valeria luisielli // cecilia corrigan // clementine von radics // ocean vuong // nicola yoon // catherine lacey // leanna firestone

[litandlifequotes]

I also like the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

[sublecturas]

“Desierto sonoro” de Valeria Luiselli

[elwenyere]

“I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude.”

― Valeria Luiselli, from Lost Children Archive

[ghostingfee]

read a little over half of The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli tonight and was surprised how much I ended up liking it. Looking forward to finishing it tomorrow or the day after tomorrow

[veryslowreader]

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

The White Lotus: "Ciao"

[gerbie7]

Valeria Luiselli – Vertel me het einde

Denk dat dit essay grotendeels autobiografisch is. Heb een geweldig boek van haar gelezen, een novelle waar ik niet veel van begreep. Haar passie is duidelijk, haar hart zit op de juiste plek. In dit essay gaat het over de vragen die minderjarige vluchtelingen krijgen voordat wordt besloten of ze mogen blijven in de VS. Daar zitten logische vragen tussen, maar ook absurde. De hele procedure is…

[johnesimpson]

Awfully Far Out, but Not Yet Drowning

Charles Bukowski, Stevie Smith, et al.: 'Awfully Far Out, but Not Yet Drowning'

[Image: “Badlands Seascape,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)] From whiskey river: Dinosauria, We (excerpt) We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings…

[butyourewrong]

Los ingrávidos, Valeria Luiselli

[sesamereviews]

Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli

Luiselli’s writing style throughout this essay was consistently understandable and attractive to me. She evokes empathy even with limited perspectives. The title, referring to her daughter asking her “Tell me how it ends” as she recounts stories of the children she encounters, is rather heartbreaking with the reminder that the victims of violence and neglect from the countries they came from and continue to suffer through the immigration system (no matter how much patriots of the US want to defend its benefits), they are just children who are undeserving of the harm they’ve suffered and are in need of a better life. They shouldn’t have to justify their need for help and prove their trauma; the 40 questions, while helpful for building a defense case, are understandably hard to answer and are lacking empathy in essence (although not from the nonprofit organizations that created them, but rather from the system that demands them). 

My only wish would have been for it to be more extended and more in-depth about the more memorable cases she took on. However, that’s also understandable given the way she relates them to her own immigration process. The question asked most, in the end, is this; “Why did they/you/I come to the United States?”

It draws attention to a system barely any mainstream news media pay attention to anymore, at least from what I’ve seen, mainly since I also lived in the States during the time of Trump’s inauguration and heard the news of “Mexico paying for a wall” and the immigration crisis. I simply didn’t understand and suffered none of its consequences since I was so young then, and I had the privilege of holding an American passport and citizenship because my mother purposely traveled there when giving birth to me. It makes me want to do better, which makes the hopeful note at the end all the more impactful and admirable.

[wyllzel]

That poem ends with a vow to the passing stranger: “I am to see to it that I do not lose you.” It’s a promise of permanence: this fleeting moment of intimacy shared between you and me, two strangers, will leave a trace, will reverberate forever. And in many ways, I think we kept that promise with some of the strangers we encountered and recorded over the years—their voices and stories coming back to haunt us. But we never imagined that that poem, and especially that last line, was also a sort of cautionary tale for us. Committed as we were to collecting intimacies with strangers, devoted as we were to listening so attentively to their voices, we never suspected that silence would slowly grow between the two of us. We never imagined that one day, we would have somehow lost each other amid the crowd.

—from Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli.

[sublecturas]

"Desierto sonoro", de Valeria Luiselli

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Lost Children Archive

By Valeria Luiselli.

Design by Jo Walker.

[elwenyere]

“She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”

― Valeria Luiselli, from Lost Children Archive

[damoreads]

"The Reality of Child Immigration: A Review of 'Tell Me How It Ends'"

I have found myself shaking my head quite often while reading Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli. This is because what the young Mexican writer recounts in her approximately 100 pages essay leaves the reader perplexed.

The book describes Valeria Luiselli's experience and thoughts as an interpreter supporting minors from Central America (Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, just to name a few). These children find themselves alone in the United States.

Their stay involves undergoing a 40-question questionnaire that the Government requires them to complete before presenting their case to a judge who will ultimately determine whether they can remain in the country or not. In this process, Luiselli serves as an interpreter, tasked with translating the questions and answers for the minors.

Reading the various stories of the minors interviewed by the writer, one can't help but shake their head in disbelief. These heart-wrenching tales depict the long and arduous journeys that these children undertake to escape poverty and organized crime in their home countries. Their pilgrimage towards the United States is fraught with danger, including the risk of kidnappings and sexual assaults.

The book is structured in such a way that each chapter corresponds to one of the 40 questions, creating a sense of order and structure within the chaotic and overwhelming reality that these minors face. However, as the stories unfold, a surrealism emerges that underscores the Kafkaesque nature of a bureaucratic process attempting to organize and simplify the lives of children who have arrived alone in a foreign country seeking refuge.

What sets this book apart is Luiselli's unique perspective. She straddles two worlds: that of the bureaucracy that is tasked with summarizing a minor's fate in just a few pages, and that of a woman who has firsthand experience of the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with waiting to obtain a green card.