Asunder

Starred review from May 13, 2013
Marie, the protagonist and narrator of this stunningly good second novel (after Book of Clouds), works as a guard at London’s National Gallery—a quiet job for a quiet person who shares a flat with a woman named Jane and spends her evenings creating miniature landscapes in hollowed-out eggshells. The plotting is rail-thin—a co-worker collapses and dies on the job; Marie and Jane visit an eerie cathedral town; Marie travels to Paris with her friend and former colleague, Daniel Harper—but the author creates a strange but palpable narrative momentum. More important, Aridjis casts a powerful light on all kinds of subjects with her digressions: the 1914 attack on one of the gallery’s masterpieces (Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus) by suffragette Mary Richardson is connected to the coming “great European disorder” of WWI. “Craquelure,” the tendency of paint to crack on the canvas, becomes a metaphor for entropic decay even as it “throbs with rich variety.” A book of photographs of “somewhat savage women” is glossed as “female lives condensed into a series of dramatic gestures.” While there’s a distinctly feminist scent wafting through the pages of this short, beautiful novel, it never feels remotely polemical—in fact, it’s all the more powerful for being so irreducible to a single theme. Aridjis’s intelligent prose makes this slight story into something dramatic and affecting, completely coherent and oddly irresistible. It is a brilliant book. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates.

June 15, 2013

An acute observer, narrator Marie, a museum guard at London's National Gallery, has an intimate knowledge of the paintings around her. She watches the behavior of visitors and absorbs art history lessons from the experts passing through. Her great-grandfather, also a museum guard, once failed to stop a suffragette from assaulting with an axe a piece by the Spanish painter Diego Velazquez, and the destruction of art--whether by vandals or time's deterioration--weighs on her. Marie's passive and unassuming demeanor matches her seemingly aimless personal life. Her relationship with her roommate is friendly but distant, and she is adrift in a noncommittal relationship with colleague and poet Daniel, with whom she suffers a listless vacation in Paris. There, an eccentric friend of Daniel's turns up, a minor poet in Daniel's eyes, who consumes Daniel's energies and leaves Marie at loose ends. VERDICT Aridjis masters the difficult theme of ennui, giving shape to Marie's aimlessness. Following up on her first novel, Book of Clouds, winner of the 2009 Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, the author gives readers literary fiction with a postmodern sensibility.--Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., VA

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Starred review from August 15, 2013
A self-effacing life devoted to obsessive minutiae is cracked open in this oblique, disturbing, yet oddly compelling tale. Surreal and haunting, Aridjis' (Book of Clouds, 2009) understated second novel, set in London, traces a decisive phase in the life of Marie, a 33-year-old museum guard who has worked at the National Gallery for nearly 10 years. With her days spent almost invisibly among the visitors and paintings, her free time is passed in similarly low-key fashion, hanging out with a poet friend, Daniel, or working on a collection of peculiar sculptures--landscapes made inside eggshells. Marie's hypnotic half-life is dotted with eccentric characters--a taxidermist; her flatmate, who is obsessed with moth strips--and brief yet telling descriptive sidebars about strange details, like the causes of craquelure (cracked varnish on old paintings) or the destruction of a famous work of art at the gallery by a suffragette, an act witnessed by Marie's great-grandfather. Prisons, mental institutions and peculiar visions of decay crop up repeatedly, while actual events are few. But during a strange, vaguely unpleasant holiday in Paris with Daniel, a chance encounter in a dilapidated chateau pushes Marie over an invisible line. Dark and peculiar, simultaneously sinister and playful, Aridjis' modern gothic vision will charm those prepared to linger in her cabinet of curiosities.

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Starred review from September 15, 2013
Aridjis' captivating, cerebral novel is set in a modern-day London that, when envisioned via her sophisticated prose, calls to mind more contemplative times of a century ago. Marie is a guard in the quiet, churchlike rooms of the National Gallery, where for nearly 10 years she has observed with equal fascination the body language of visitors and the slow decay of masterpieces. Quiet and unattached, Marie likes the invisibility that her job allows her. In 1914, her great-grandfather was a guard when suffragette Mary Richardson took a cleaver to a revered painting of Venus in repose. Although there are hints of suspense in the connection to that time, just as there are promises of romantic entanglements, Aridjis is most interested in ideas. What is it like to stand silently amid such beauty for a decade? Indeed, Marie's satisfaction gives way to restlessness on a strange Paris holiday. The novel stumbles a bit when overdone symbolism gets in the way of our own observation of Marie, but Aridjis' layered, painterly prose evokes this world to perfection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)