Asunder - by Chloe Aridjis (Paperback)

About the Book

From a writer praised for her fresh, original voice (New York Times Book Review) and hypnotic prose (Junot Díaz) comes a captivating novel about two museum guards in London for whom life and art begin to overtake one another in unsettling and surreal ways.

Book Synopsis

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.

After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Asunder:
Stunningly good . . . All the more powerful for being irreducible to a single theme . . . Dramatic and affecting, completely coherent and oddly irresistible . . . A brilliant book." Publishers Weekly, starred review
There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay . . . It is the work of an addicted image-maker who fills her cabinet of curiosities and then adds some more . . . [Asunder] thrills with energy. The Guardian (UK)
Brilliantly exact and disconcerting, Asunder exists with an intensity stronger than that of most novels. Reading it is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination." Diana Athill, author of Stet and Somewhere Towards the End
Exhilarating. Powerful and artful, Asunder works like a poem, pulling us into a labyrinthine sequence of connected images. Aridjis requires us to be active, playful readers . . . [but] at the same time we yield to the novel's insistent flow, its currents and eddies of sensual thought. This all makes for rapturous and enraptured reading. The Independent (UK)
"Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange . . . This is deft and shimmering fiction." Times Literary Supplement

MARINER
www.marinerbooks.com
$13.95
ISBN 978-0-544-00346-0
Fiction

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Review Quotes

"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. . . [Her] layered, painterly prose evokes this world to perfection."
--Booklist (starred review)

"Dark and peculiar, simultaneously sinister and playful, Aridjis' modern gothic vision will charm those prepared to linger in her cabinet of curiosities. . . [An] oddly compelling tale."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"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."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Lyrical and haunting. . . A beautiful portrait of urban loneliness, and the pursuit of meaning amid the barbed comforts of solitude."
--Economist

"[Asunder] is full of shadows and symbolism one can't quite put a finger on. . . A study in grayness and halftones, never using the extremes of black and white or bold color. . . [yet] her observations often have a startling zing."
--New York Journal of Books

"Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange... This is deft and shimmering fiction."
--Times Literary Supplement (UK)

"Chloe Aridjis's debut novel, Book of Clouds--winner of the French Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in 2009--was a critical success and a daunting act to follow. [With its] unusual imagery and lyrical style. . . Aridjis has risen to the occasion with Asunder. . . An absorbing and moving book."
--Financial Times (UK)

"Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing. . . An original and assertive performance with more than a hint of the baroque. . . Having surprised us in Berlin (in Book of Clouds), Aridjis surprises us again with her comical and macabre version of London, where goths huddle in nightclub corners 'like packed umbrella stands' and a hypnotist might cure your headache while bequeathing you a limp. . . There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay. . . Obsessed by museums and collections, the novel is itself a museum of motifs displayed in tense juxtaposition. It is the work of an addicted image-maker who fills her cabinet of curiosities and then adds some more. . . [Chloe Aridjis's] novel thrills with energy."
--Alexandra Harris, Guardian (UK) "In this little gem of a novel, Aridjis takes on the troubling questions of life and quietly works her way to the best answers she can find. . . Aridjis is something of a genius in her ability to enrich the ordinary with epiphanies rendered in deceptively short and simple prose."
--Bruce Jacobs, Shelf Awareness

"Brilliantly exact and disconcerting, Asunder exists with an intensity stronger than that of most novels. Reading it is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination."
--Diana Athill, author of Stet and Somewhere Towards the End

"Chloe Aridjis writes about sensations at the edges of perception, capturing experiences rarely included in fiction. A surprising sensibility and an effortlessly original voice."
--Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation

About the Author

"Asunder" is her second novel.