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The author is toying with us and our contemporary desire for total knowability
The author is toying with us and our contemporary desire for total knowabilityThere’s something extraordinary about Chloe Aridjis’s writing in The Shadow of the Object, a quality both intoxicating and unsettling.
It almost reads like an overly precise and thus mildly unheimlich translation of another’s work. Between sittings, I kept having that experience of remembering the mood of a dream I must have had only to realise that, no, I was recalling the book. Yearning to get back to the book, more accurately, to submerge myself in its strange logic.
The sentences and happenings appear disarmingly simple, their complexity betrayed only occasionally by a vocabulary possibly too overtly writerly for our narrator Flora, a Mexican-English silver polisher living in London. Despite reading the narrative from her perspective, Flora, like every other character, remains vague and ultimately unknowable, a voice much younger seeming that her “forty-something” years: “Who was I? ... Phlegmatic, melancholic, yet prone to occasional acts of daring, a flat line interrupted by a sudden jump.
If pressed, probably more centripetal than centrifugal in nature. ”Betrayal by Luke Harding: A colourful, entertaining take on Trump, Russia and UkraineThis opacity is, of course, no accident. Aridjis is toying with us and our contemporary desire for total knowability. Instead, Flora is less a character and more a “shadow puppet”, performing in a somewhat jaggedly meandering inquiry into the nature of reality, action, consequence, repetition and desire.
The actual occurrences – a dog bite, a hospital stay, a return home, a friendship struck, a mouse bite, a boat trip – provide only the means to offering us a query far more majestic. Something like: how do people spend their small portion of time within the grand scale of time?hint of the mood – that word again, but this is what The Shadow of the Object proved to be, a moodscape built through story – that seeps down from the mind, through the chest and into the stomach, when reading Borges or Dante or Woolf.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that here too we have grand maps laid out , along with puzzles, toys, projected images, stories, memories, people walking aimlessly around a big city, and a somewhat “eldritch” romance, borne, perhaps like all romances, out of the disappeared and the dead. Lucy Sweeney Byrne is the author of two short story collections, Paris Syndrome and Let’s Dance , both published with Banshee Press.
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