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A review by shanviolinlove
Asunder by Chloe Aridjis
5.0
Astounding novel. I have been reflecting on why it slowed my reading pace so significantly; I usually read through books twice its length in half the time. For one thing, there are no throwaway sentences, rare among novels. For another, Chloe Aridjis writes poetry in her prose, careful and elegant observations that deeply probe the surface level. In Chapter Six, she considers angles, literal and figurative, that took place during a significant event in the story; in other places, she considers the decay of art--of everything--and how art was meant to create something out of chaos, only to succumb to chaos in the end.
The heroine, Marie, is weird. She picks up a stagnant job for that very reason--and sticks with it for nine years! She paints landscapes in eggshells, scouring London for art supplies to capture specific shades and textures, and then mounts dead moths into them. She likes peeking into taxidermy shops. She was in love with a man who owned the skull of a 12-year-old boy from the 1800s. Her love life, on that note, is even lonelier than Emily Dickinson's. She is fascinated by the mundane and the macabre, much like the entirety of this novel. Were I to sum up the plot, it would fit in a sentence. So much is happening within interiority--Marie recalls different people in her life, the odds and ends of their lives. It's a novel that reflects the pace of someone whose vocation is spent watching others, a vocation that allows for infinite amounts of think-space. She recalls her great-grandfather, a fellow art museum guard, who once witnessed an aggressive act by a suffragette, and Marie constantly returns to this memory she herself does not actually possess. The dynamic juxtaposed against her passive, undisturbing life. Until it gets disturbed, but even then, the novel takes its time getting there.
This is definitely not a story for everyone, and I can easily see how someone looking to be engaged in a plot would grow fatigued by how long it takes for a plot point to occur. (Indeed, the book flap describes an event that doesn't actually occur until three quarters into the novel.) But if you're looking for something quietly interesting, unsettling even in its simplicity, check this one out. I found myself reading it slowly, sometimes only a chapter at a time--not my usual--but enjoying myself to the very end.
The heroine, Marie, is weird. She picks up a stagnant job for that very reason--and sticks with it for nine years! She paints landscapes in eggshells, scouring London for art supplies to capture specific shades and textures, and then mounts dead moths into them. She likes peeking into taxidermy shops. She was in love with a man who owned the skull of a 12-year-old boy from the 1800s. Her love life, on that note, is even lonelier than Emily Dickinson's. She is fascinated by the mundane and the macabre, much like the entirety of this novel. Were I to sum up the plot, it would fit in a sentence. So much is happening within interiority--Marie recalls different people in her life, the odds and ends of their lives. It's a novel that reflects the pace of someone whose vocation is spent watching others, a vocation that allows for infinite amounts of think-space. She recalls her great-grandfather, a fellow art museum guard, who once witnessed an aggressive act by a suffragette, and Marie constantly returns to this memory she herself does not actually possess. The dynamic juxtaposed against her passive, undisturbing life. Until it gets disturbed, but even then, the novel takes its time getting there.
This is definitely not a story for everyone, and I can easily see how someone looking to be engaged in a plot would grow fatigued by how long it takes for a plot point to occur. (Indeed, the book flap describes an event that doesn't actually occur until three quarters into the novel.) But if you're looking for something quietly interesting, unsettling even in its simplicity, check this one out. I found myself reading it slowly, sometimes only a chapter at a time--not my usual--but enjoying myself to the very end.