Dialogue with a Somnambulist
Stories, Essays & A Portrait Gallery
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels, PEN/Faulkner Award winner Chloe Aridjis now offers readers her first collection of shorter works, with an introduction by Tom McCarthy
Chloe Aridjis’s stories and essays are known to transport readers into liminal, often dreamlike, realms. In this collection of works, we meet a woman guided only by a plastic bag drifting through the streets of Berlin who discovers a nonsense-named bar that is home to papier-mâché monsters and one glass-encased somnambulist. Floating through space, cosmonauts are confronted not only with wonder and astonishment, but tedium and solitude. And in Mexico City, stray dogs animate public spaces, “infusing them with a noble life force.” In her pen portraits, Aridjis turns her eye to expats and outsiders, including artists and writers such as Leonora Carrington, Mavis Gallant, and Beatrice Hastings.
Exploring the complexity of exile and urban alienation, Dialogue with a Somnambulist showcases “the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book” (Garth Greenwell) and who is as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mexican American writer Aridjis (Sea Monsters) conjures the strange and marvelous in this dazzling collection of stories and essays. In the magnificent title piece, which unfolds like a goth music video, the Berlin-based narrator follows a plastic bag "blown by a mysterious current" to a ramshackle bar filled with papier-mâché monsters and a wax giant with jealous tendencies. "Crustaceans" features a teenage boy looked after by his grandmother, who eats sea monkeys and disappears as suddenly as she appeared in his life. Insomnia is a recurring motif and provides fertile ground for Aridjis's vast imagination. The protagonist of "In the Arms of Morpheus" is preoccupied by a chance encounter at a sleep-study clinic with another patient, while in the autobiographical essay "Kopfkino," Aridjis describes moving to Berlin in 2003, where night felt "so laden with signals" she was hardly able to shut them out. The bulk of the nonfiction revolves around the beauty and tragedy of Mexico. In the standout piece "Baroque," for example, Aridjis places the "unabashed theatricality" of the drug cartels' violence in a centuries-old tradition of Mexican Baroque that emerged from clashes between Spanish, French, and Indigenous cultures and includes antagonistic expressions such as lucha libre. A surreal mood and intellectual heft sustain and unify the varied collection. Readers will eagerly turn the page to see where Aridjis takes them next.
