Valeria Luiselli's Desierto sonoro and the Sonic Registers of the Novel

Abstract

Abstract: Desierto sonoro (2019), Valeria Luiselli's first novel written in English and published both in English and Spanish translation, has been read by critics as an anglophone novel of "sentimental activism" (David James), with focus on the literary representation of an ongoing refugee crisis of children migrating across the southern border of the United States. This essay argues that the multiple archival registers of the novel—listening and recording devices as well as books, notes, photographs—suggest a hemispheric dimension, enabling a reading of the novel situated both in the Latin American tradition of archival fictions as well as the Anglo-American modernist tradition. As a modernist novel written in a densely poetic style, Desierto sonoro is concerned with inhabiting a past always already mediated by other texts, music, and images; as a Latin American novel, its concern is with the critique and retelling of foundational myths, embodied in storytelling and the realist tradition of Latin American writing. As such, through a deployment of different registers of experience, this novel challenges readers to think of archives as depositories of both written history and oral storytelling.