Sea Monsters: A Novel
Set in 1980s Mexico, the novel follows teenage Luisa as she moves between family, desire, loss, and strange encounters while trying to define herself. Dreamlike images and a slight tilt away from ordinary reality give the coming-of-age story an unusual density and emotional strangeness.
Work Information
In a world set just a little off from ordinary reality, a girl's unease and longing slowly expand.
Sea Monsters follows Luisa, a seventeen-year-old girl from Mexico City, as she slips into an escape with a near stranger while carrying unease about family and the future. In a seaside setting that feels suspended and unstable, the novel renders adolescent impulse, loneliness, and self-searching like a sequence of quietly shifting images.
Review Summaries
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The writing is read as capturing adolescent drift by putting its weight on atmosphere and perception rather than plot. Its appeal lies less in straight-line momentum than in the very feeling of digression.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Catapult
- Published
- 2020-02-18
- Pages
- 224 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.94 x 1.52 x 20.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781948226776
- ISBN-10
- 1948226774
- Price
- 7752 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Biographical
Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle–class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is “a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments” ( Los Angeles Review of Books ). One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen–year–old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.” Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us. "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald’s or Cusk’s, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self–contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
CHLOE ARIDJIS is a Mexican American writer based in London. She is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds , which won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France; Asunder , set in London’s National Gallery; and Sea Monsters , which was awarded the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Aridjis has written for various art journals and was guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2020. Aridjis is a founding member of XR Writers Rebel, a group of writers who focus on addressing biodiversity loss and the climate emergency: www.writersrebel.com.
Reviews
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Going along
Chloe Aridjis perfectly captures a teenaged girl who feels that she is being swept along by fate. I can remember having that feeling of wanting to see what happens next, as if being moved by an unseen hand.
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wonderful - everyone MUST read this book
a new novel by Chloe Aridjis is a major event. Her previous novels were superb and stick in the mind. this one is great triumph, i read it the evening it came in front of the fire - and did not get up until finished. a masterpiece
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I have to say...
I have to say that I'm a very discerning reader and dislike a lot of books, usually because the writing does not capture my imagination, or seems trite, following a formula, telling me things I already know. This book jumped off the pages like a lizard going after my lunch. I loved it! After the first chapter it settles down. It was written in one review that the book had no plot and that is what interested me. And I have to disagree. The plot is in the writing and in the mind of a teenage girl. A very auspicious teenage girl. A reckless teenage girl. And that is the plot. Can she survive her own recklessness. Not for everyone, but like I said, I am a very discerning critic and dislike most books. Not this one.
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Strange fable
Not as strong, in my view, as her previous novels, but still interesting. The story reads like a YA or child's tale: the naivety of the girl and her boyfriend are touching and convincing, but something about the way it proceeds places it more in the territory of fable or 'coming-of-age allegory' than adult fiction. Ultimately I found the central characters annoyingly self-centred - but that's often how teenagers are! Beach setting reminiscent of the Garland novel of that title, with a fairly similar tone and theme
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Lived up to the reviews!
One of the best books I have read recently. Spent a wonderful evening in cold England reading this engaging warm novel.