Review: "Boy, Lost" by Kristina Olsson
The front cover of Boy, Lost defines Kristina Olsson’s work as a “family memoir”. And it is. It tells of how a whole family is affected by the grief of one moment: a mother has to deal with the loss of a son who is stolen from her arms, a lost boy has to search for his stolen childhood, and a family has to live with the ghosts of that boy, lost, who haunts them.
But the devastating truth is that Boy, Lost tells the story of more than just one family. It tells the story of many families all over Australia, of children lost and stolen, and it is fed by the ghosts of an Australian history that is often forgotten. There is often a desire to ignore the mistakes of our past, but Boy, Lost refuses to let that happen; it draws the reader into the past, into the heart of the storm, and forces them to witness the truth of our past and the lies on which this country is built. There is no escaping it either because once you delve into Boy, Lost you are lost in its pages, trapped by both the poetic prose, which marches you forward through devastating acts and heartbreaking emotions, and a world that has been created in such a way that it feels real and inescapable.
Olsson succeeds in transporting a contemporary reader back to a time they might not know or remember; she recreates a history—and, for many, a reality—that seems to rise from the pages of the book. It is then that the reader cannot escape the reality of what they are reading: Boy, Lost “wasn’t a story” (220).
We are led to question in what kind of world can a lawyer tell a mother not to fight for her son? In what kind of world do people not help a frail and scared young woman whose son is being ripped from her arms? In what kind of world does a little boy get returned to a home that is not safe or healthy? We are so sucked into the book, trapped in it, that it is impossible for us to escape the truth: our world. It was in our world, in our country, in our home that these realities happened day in and day out, to families all over Australia, and Boy, Lost will not let us escape that again.
Boy, Lost is a family memoire. It is a memoire for all the children that have been lost and stolen, for all the parents who have lost and been stolen from, and for all the remaining family members who were left, as Kristina Olsson and her siblings were, to deal with the darkness buried behind the happiness of a good childhood with a grieving mother.
Olsson’s memoire frees her family from the ghost of a lost boy that had haunted them and from the grief that cascades down the generations; however, Peter’s reunion with his lost family “wasn’t even an ending” (220), because it is real life and that does not just end. Despite that, Boy, Lost leaves us with that hope that if the memoire is not an ending, perhaps it could be a beginning where there is a new boy, a new man, waiting to be found.
