Chloe AridjisCríticas
Autor(a) de Book of Clouds
Críticas
Sea monsters : a novel por Chloe Aridjis
The tone is brilliantly set from the opening paragraph: "It was an evening when the moral remains of the city bobbed up to the surface and floated like driftwood before sinking back down to the seabed to further splinter and rot." Now there's a sentence to make any city's Chamber of Commerce fall to its knees in pain.
The narrative vehicle for this contemporary analysis of Berlin is the story of Tatiana, a young woman from a Mexican Jewish family, who has lived in Berlin for several years. She muddles along in the post-German reunification haze, working part-time for a historian, transcribing his spoken notes. She has difficulty making any real connection with people or work and bounces along on each path, unable to settle anywhere for long. Berlin's past seems to colonize her imagination, leaving her unbalanced in the present. Ultimately an act of violence (with a resolution from the school of urban magical realism) prompts her to sever ties with the city and return to her family in Mexico.
All in all, a well-written debut novel to be read for its take on the interplay of past and present.
To get a sense of the novel's language, here are some sentences and phrases I liked:
" Someone once said that the dream is the aquarium of the night, but to my mind night was the aquarium of the dream, with our visions framed within it."
"To imagine travel is probably better than actually traveling since no journey can ever satisfy human desire; as soon as one sets out, fantasies get tangled in the rigging and dark birds of doubt begin their circling overhead."
“tall weeds that rose around the house like the soil’s unbrushed hair”
10 Stars! The best literary stunner I've read this year. Deeply textured and intricately layered, this literary gem is destined to become a classic studied by high school and college students everywhere.
Marie works as a guard for the National Gallery in England. Her great grandfather was also a guard at the same museum. His story of his inability to stop an angry suffragette from vandalizing a painting haunted him forever.
Marie spends most of her life content to be an observer except for the tiny landscape creations she makes and places on a high shelf in her bedroom. Her best friend, Daniel, is a struggling poet bent on perfection. Their friendship walks a tightrope between tenderness and despair.
The entire story is a meditation on the inevitable surrender of decay, from the classic artwork in the museum subject to craquelure to Marie's roommate who spends thousands of dollars on cosmetics promised to trap youth and prevent aging.
Written with startlingly fresh images and deep insights, Asunder will leave you torn open.
This one's a gem, and I'm genuinely surprised that so few LibraryThing members have it in their collections. "Asunder" is one of those novels that takes us deep inside a world most people probably don't give a lot of thought to: the world of museum guards. The book's main character, Marie, is a actually the second museum guard in her family line and, after ten years pacing quiet hallways and near-empty galleries, is more than used to her duties at the National Gallery. Marie is a patient, unobtrusive type, and knows it. She's in a working-class profession, but hardly ignorant about art or inured to the beauty that she spends her working life around. Indeed, some of this novel's most productive relationships take place not between its characters but between Marie and the paintings she spends her days guarding. The author has certainly done her research, and the insight she gives her readers into a profession that's characterized by silence, danger, beauty and boredom in more or less equal measure is often fascinating.
"Asunder", predictably enough, turns on whether the book's principal events of its plot will Marie to stick with her secure, highly predictable employment or move out into the wider world. This is, also perhaps predictably, a novel in which minor plot events cause ripples in its characters' lives that feel more like waves: not so very much happens, but Aridjis's measured precise prose ensures that readers will understand the full emotional import of every seemingly unimportant event. For all the dead time and empty space she describes in "Asunder," her writing is hardly the sort of functional, personality-free "white writing" we've come to expect from writers who specialize in sterile modern settings. While her subjects aren't necessarily extraordinary, Aridjis's prose can take some unexpectedly fantastic turns: at one point Marie imagines the faces of the art restoration students she's watching crack and flake like the paintings they're examining. There are places, where the analogies that the author draws might seem a touch too literary or on-the-nose, but other, deeper themes in this book are explored with a subtlety and a light touch that is nothing sort of masterful. I was pleasantly surprised at how real Marie felt to me after just under two hundred pages. Recommended to art lovers, fans of good prose, and to those who love a good underdog story.
1 
TheAmpersand | 3 outras críticas | Dec 21, 2020 |
TheAmpersand | 3 outras críticas | Dec 21, 2020 | Their journey lands them in the costal town of Zipolite, where she tires of Tomas in favor of a more exotic sand castle builder whom she refers to as a merman. The plot is not important here. It is the language and imagery that make the novel interesting, that and the appreciation of a time and place unfamiliar to most. The author's descriptions of the waves and the landscapes demonstrate her poetic skills.
The Atlantic sums it up: "the novel’s satisfactions come not from character growth or plot resolution, but from the evoking of emotion through symbols. As Luisa wanders through Zipolite, she returns to a handful of images: iguanas, breaking waves, shipwrecks, the island of Kythera, an ancient Greek predictive device known as the Antikythera Mechanism. Each one shifts in meaning, like the seashells, and tracking their evolving significance pulls readers deep into the novel’s interpretive project."
Some lines:
Sometimes I would see Tomás walk past, his shadow easy to pluck out from the rest, and although he kept a certain distance I recognized him instantly, tall and slender with a jaunty gait, like a puppet of wood and cloth slipped over a giant hand.
Remember, he’d say, society is like a fish tank, only less beautiful to watch. The structure is not so different, however: here we have the shy fish who spend their lives hiding between the rocks, missing out on moments both important and trivial, then the gregarious types who crisscross the water in search of company or adventure, always on the move without knowing where they’re headed, and then the curious ones who hover close to the surface, first in line for food but also first should any hand or paw plunge in.
His face was from another continent and another era, with hooded wide-set eyes and thick lips and sloping eyebrows. And even more like my favorite actor, Peter Lorre, his expression could go within seconds from gentle to glowering to broken and forlorn, the face of someone historically haunted, a face that seemed to carry in it several chapters of European history.
El Pitufo, a coke dealer who wrote poetry; people listened to him recite his latest poems in exchange for free samples, and the more they consumed, the better his poetry sounded to their ears. He longed to be taken seriously, but when people saw him all they could think of was fine white lines.
El Nueve was the nocturnal reply to the daylight hours, the place that drew those of us who preferred European moonlight to the Mexican sun. Located halfway down Londres in the Zona Rosa, it played dark wave, post punk, and industrial, often courtesy of its Scottish DJ, an angular Goth who wore pointy boots and a black suede tassel jacket.
There are two kinds of romantics, my older cousin had explained, the kind who is constantly falling in love and simply needs a person into whom they can pour every thought, dream, and project, and the kind of romantic who remains alone, waiting and waiting for the right person to arrive, a person who may not even exist. It was too early to know which kind I would be.
This is the slim paperback novel I bought at Waterstones in London to read on the train trip to Edinburgh, and it was very appropriate. The main character is a security guard at the British National Gallery, which we had just visited. She is an introverted young woman with artistic interests and a quasi-boyfriend with whom she visits Paris to house-sit for several weeks. Her grandfather was a retired guard at the gallery who often tells her the story of a suffragette who managed to slash a painting (as a protest) before he could stop her. I was surprised to learn (through Google) that this was a real historical act for which someone called Mary Richardson was arrested. It was a well-written book with great descriptions of modern life in London and Paris but not a very clear plot.
SPOILERS BELOW! Full review on goodreads with tagged/hidden spoilers.
Sometime in the mid-1980s. This short novel follows 17-year-old Luisa. She disappears after school one day, traveling to Oaxaca (Zipolite) with her new friend/boyfriend Tómas (19). She claims to be looking for a group of Ukrainian dwarves who disappeared from the Soviet circus they were traveling with. Tómas takes her to a tourist beach he likes. They mostly hang out, eat lunch at one of the beach restaurants (which sounds much more casual and cheaper than a CA beach restaurant), drink beer, and sleep in hammocks--as they slowly run through their money. One day they walk to town. She thinks about calling her parents, but doesn't. She has not exactly run away (she knows she will return), but they do not know where she is. She and Tómas drift apart, as she realizes they don't have much in common. Instead she hooks up with an older (30ish?) man she imagines is from Eastern Europe and does not speak Spanish. They eat dinner together regularly, apparently never talking? She finally sees him during the day and learns that he is Gustavo, one of the Mexican men who has a dinghy that takes tourists back and forth to different beaches.
She does not head home herself, her father finds her, with the assistance of Tómas' father. She perfectly willingly returns home, and seems rather glad to be found.
A coming-of-age story, through really there isn't much here. She is gone maybe 10 days? The cover flap says "pulsing to the soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave....". Not exactly. The best parts, for me, were the mentions of bands and songs (The Smiths, several times, and others). But I wouldn't call it a soundtrack.
Moody and atmospheric, but it doesn't really go anywhere.
Asunder is a short book, but it demands a lot of its reader. Its main character, Marie, is a guard at the National Gallery in London where she has worked for nine years becoming intimately acquainted with the museum's many works of art and sinking into a life of days marked by routine and lack of ambition. There is little plot to speak of, just Marie's slow dawning realization that she's allowed her life to become like one of the paintings she guards: ripe for contemplation but requiring her to maintain a safe distance. Marie's life within Aridjis' pages is austere, marked by long days at the museum, evenings crafting delicate dioramas from egg shells, and a bizarre friendship with fellow museum-guard and poet, Daniel, a relationship that demands the following of a certain set of rules to "thrive," and a relationship that each fails to push beyond the realm of awkward friendship despite numerous opportunities.
I struggled with very mixed feelings about Asunder. On one hand, Aridjis's writing is compelling. She can turn a phrase, and the way she describes the strung together episodes of Marie's life draws out the mundane life she leads as well as a few surreal, bizarre occurrences that finally set up Marie's life for a change. On the other hand, Asunder is a very short book that took me so long to read because I ended up pausing numerous times to stare into the middle distance trying to piece together what seemed to be a collection of unrelated events into some sort of cohesively themed whole. I always felt like I was on the verge of understanding the larger scheme of what Aridjis was trying to say but never quite getting there. In the end, without a little more help understanding the nature of Marie's transformation, Asunder failed to make the jump from a compelling piece of artful writing to an engaging story, and I was left with the distinct impression that I was missing something, rather than the closure I was looking for in Asunder.
1 yourotherleft | 3 outras críticas | Sep 1, 2014 |
yourotherleft | 3 outras críticas | Sep 1, 2014 | History plays a major role in the book, particularly the dark stories that lurk beneath the surface. There are plenty of those in Berlin, both from the Nazi and the Communist era, buildings in which people were imprisoned or tortured, now converted into schools, apartment buildings and water towers. Right at the beginning of the book, Tatiana sees what she believes is an aged Hitler dressed as a woman on an underground train. Then there’s the underground Gestapo bowling alley that Tatiana explores late at night and almost gets trapped inside when she runs away from her group to go and rub out the chalked scores from the board. There’s the upstairs part of her building, where nobody seems to live but from which strange noises appear. She goes up there, looking for ghosts perhaps, and finds a dark stain on the wall which reminds her of the scores she rubbed out:
“wondering whether this dark imprint was somehow mocking me, reminding me of the inevitable, which was, of course, that nothing can be truly rubbed away or blotted out, and how the more your try to rub something away the darker it becomes.”
This, it seems, is a major theme of the book. There’s not too much background about Tatiana’s life in Mexico so it’s never very clear what she’s trying to blot out, but she is definitely trying. I read in an interview that an earlier draft of this book had more of the Mexican backstory included, but was cut out from the final version. The effect is to leave much unanswered, which can be a good thing, but it also made it difficult to understand the character’s alienation.
Overall: beautiful, dreamy writing, lots of solitary musing and a good sense of the city of Berlin and its history. But the character is essentially solitary and self-absorbed, which can be frustrating. If you’re prepared to let things meander along, enjoy the elegant writing, appreciate the sharp observations and muse on the possible truths hidden in the shapes of the clouds, this would be a good read. But if you want a plot that develops or characters that interact with each other in comprehensible ways, this is probably not the book for you.
1 AndrewBlackman | 10 outras críticas | Aug 20, 2011 |
AndrewBlackman | 10 outras críticas | Aug 20, 2011 | I confess, I didn't like the main character. That may have been intentional, considering how much I liked Aridjis' writing, but I found her character's rude and condescending demeanor very off-putting. Of course, it makes sense considering she is clearly a bit loopy at times, but it limited my enjoyment during certain sections of the book.
Still, it was a worthwhile read. It's also one of those books that would be perfect for group discussion. I'm calling it 'average' but I can see others liking it more.
While I was in Paris, I went to a book reading at the bookstore Shakespeare & Company. The place was completely packed with books and people and the atmosphere was warm and friendly. The magical environment of Shakespeare & Co., and the good wine certainly contributed to the success of this enjoyable evening.
The author Chloe Aridjis read from her debut novel “Book of Clouds.” I bought the book the same evening and I read it few weeks later. At the beginning I was captivated by the words. And then by the story, a complex, multi-layered story, and poetically almost magically, weaved .
Tatiana, a young Mexican Jew woman, settles in Berlin in the early part of the twenty-first century, and cultivates a solitude life, she finds herself “needing other people less and less.” She has a part-time job as a transcriber for an elderly historian named Doktor Weiss, but was she has really become is “a professional in lost time” in a city which “ran on its own chronometric scale.”
Through the historian he meets Jonas, a meteorologist, who as a child in the East Germany found that the shape shifting and ever gone clouds offered him a sense of freedom.
Their paths intersect, the past merges with the present, and while city unfolds its secrets, dreams fuse with reality, violence takes the shape of a senseless, cloudy dream bringing change in their lives.
I liked this book. I liked the melancholic, wistful and lyrical tone, the atmospheric description of Berlin, the development of the characters.
I quote a passage from the book. I like it because it shows very convincingly and in a theatrical way why I find difficult, or rather unpleasant to work in a public library. Like the narrator, I prefer the solitude of a room.
“Apart from the delight of listening for hours to a mesmeric voice, it was a blessing to work at my own desk in an empty room in Weiss’s apartment, infinitely more pleasing than working at the library, which I’d had to do an occasion in the past, as recently as for my last job at the psychology magazine, and though libraries were fine places, actually, I always found it impossible to complete the tasks I had been assigned for the simple reason that the more often I went there the more aware I became of the other readers, and the more aware I became of the other readers the more I noticed the profusion of nervous tics and compulsive behaviour which seemed to flourish in these places. Pretty soon it was impossible to concentrate on anything, what with the girl to my right chewing her nails and the girl to my left digging at her head, and it did not take long to realize that most people are fidgeters, as is synaptic activity were encouraged by endless scratching and fidgeting, and before long I had the impression I was in a room with eighty scholarly monkeys, busily delousing as they sat reading their books or typing at their computers, and at those rare moments when I looked up and no one was doing anything I felt as if a truce had been called or an angel were flying overhead and, out of deference, the monkeys had removed their paws from their faces and hair.”
1 Maquina_Lectora | 10 outras críticas | Apr 12, 2010 |
Maquina_Lectora | 10 outras críticas | Apr 12, 2010 | Tatiana, een jonge vrouw uit Mexico is min of meer toevallig in Berlijn verzeild geraakt en is er blijven wonen. Ze is een redelijk leeg personage. Ze is alleen, eenzaam soms, doelloos, ambitieloos. Ze loopt door de stad, ze reist met de metro en de tram en neemt de omgeving en alle markante plaatsen in zich op. Berlijn is een stad waar de echo's uit het verleden nog sterk doorklinken. Dit verleden heeft zich gehecht aan de plaatsen, de gebouwen, de stations, de kelders, zo meent Dr Weiss, Tatiana's werkgever. Tatiana is iemand die die echo's hoort. Of die ze in elk geval wil zien.
Veel gebeurtenissen in het boek hebben een bijna mythische kern, sprookjesachtig, vreemd. Wat waar is en wat niet wordt in het midden gelaten, maar dat is niet erg. Het is een boek waardoor je je mee moet laten slepen, zonder het al te rationeel te bekijken. Ook zit er veel symboliek in het boek wat maakt dat je er nog lang over door kan praten. Tegelijk is de toon luchtig en soms zelfs humoristisch.
First, there's a lack of anxiety on the character's part that she is so isolated, so without interests. She knows, in the novel, that she has no friends and often does nothing for weeks or months at a time, but she is not anxious about it: it's almost as if she is on a strong course of antidepressants, so that her condition doesn't affect her.
Second, there's a lack of interest on Aridjis's part that her character is to isolated and without interests. She is clearly occasionally delusional, but that does not seem to concern Aridjis.
It is strange and ultimately disengaging to read about a character who does not care to know more about herself, described by a novelist who doesn't seem to notice that there might be more to see.
At the beginning of the book, the character imagines seeing an aging Hitler (as a woman!) on a train, and throughout the novel she remains convinced of what she thinks she's seen. At the end of the book, she hallucinates a dense fog that loosens locks throughout Berlin and causes posters to slip down from the walls. Because the character never doubts either event, the novel creates an opening: I expected Aridjis to develop a story about her mildly, occasionally delusional protagonist, and I thought the novel would probably develop into a story about her decline. But it's as if Aridjis is herself unaware of the potentially deeper psychology of her own character. In the course of the novel, the character experiences several other unusual events, and she is uncertain about a couple of things, but nothing comes of them. I had no clear sense that Aridjis meant anything by these events, other than the passing whimsy that life is sometimes odd. But what's really odd is that Aridjis doesn't experience her own character's inner life as anything except mildly surrealist, mildly entertaining, harmless and ultimately wholly ordinary. That's why in the end I am more concerned about Aridjis than her novel.
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