Acts of destruction are the presiding motifs of this assured and somewhat chilly second novel. The Mexican-American writer Chloe Aridjis is drawn to the interior life, and her exploration of it makes effective use of the world hovering just beyond the fingertips of her intriguingly philosophical narrators.
In her wonderful debut, Books of Clouds (2009), lightness and whimsy made the story of Tatiana, alone in Berlin, a twentysomething member of a large Mexican family, delightful and unpredictable. Tatiana is in thrall to her imagination, and work, in the form of half-hearted jobs, is merely something useful in the pursuit of her dream life. She recalls a visit to Germany, undertaken with her family years before. She was a child and had spotted Hitler in the aged face of an old lady on a Berlin train. No one believed her, but she knows that he was there.
Tatiana is on the run from herself, and the account of her struggle dazzles with insight. Book of Clouds is Borges meets Paul Auster, yet Aridjis brings her originality to a narrative rich in virtuosity. Eventually Tatiana does secure work worthy of her subversive intelligence when she meets up with Doktor Weiss, for whom she conducts bizarre interviews. There is darkness in the novel, murk in the form of reality, yet such is the offbeat allure of Book of Clouds that exuberance triumphs.
So how to follow such an inspired debut? With grim tenacity, it seems; the effort shows, and the author sometimes strains for effect, but Aridjis is a thinker, at times far more so than she is a storyteller.
Asunder quickly settles into being a study of stagnated maturity; Book of Clouds is about youth, and shimmers with possibility. The new novel is far bleaker; life has moved on, admittedly for a different, older and less sympathetic narrator, Marie, about whose past little is known. She is a museum guard at the National Gallery in London.
Her days are spent protecting great paintings from excited viewers tempted to touch them, as well as being on the alert for vandals and thieves. She recalls being told when she first applied for the position that the boredom would get her, eventually. She knows it won’t. She wants a safe place from which she can observe without having to engage.
Marie shares a flat with Jane, a petulant and barely sketched individual who arranges rock concerts. On a shopping mission to purchase a corset for Jane, they meet up with Lucien the goth, Marie’s former flatmate and the love of her life. As expected, he then casts his spell over Jane. Marie endures stoically; she is good at suffering, and tenses herself for the relationship that quickly develops between Lucien and Jane.
Various threads run through the narrative, and they tend to be connected, perhaps too neatly. Aridjis is an interesting writer, with a complex and cerebral vision of life, but the psychological density of her thinking weighs heavily on this slight, episodic narrative.
Her job at the National Gallery is closely linked to her fondness for her great-grandfather Ted, who also worked there. Ted has his stories; among them is a moment from history. On March 10th, 1914, a woman walked up to the famous Velázquez painting of Venus in the National Gallery in London and pulled a meat cleaver from her sleeve. The woman was Mary Richardson, a militant suffragette. She proceeded to break the glass and slash the canvas in several places. A gallery guard had seen the woman and, in his haste to reach her, tripped. That guard was Marie’s great-grandfather. It is a good story, and one in which he shows more pride than regret. Richardson’s attack on the painting had nothing to do with its artistic merit; it was a political statement.
Marie spends her spare time making miniature landscapes out of eggshells and dead moths – for her, they are an expression of self. Her other refuge is her friendship with Daniel, a former gallery guard and a poet. Their platonic friendship consists of shared meals and conversations. He appears to write poetry nonstop, even when the friends go to Paris for a holiday based on an offer to stay in an apartment owned by one of Daniel’s friends, who is going through a divorce. A trip may move Marie’s friendship on to a different level.
Daniel is a most unconvincing portrait of a poet, writing relentlessly until the arrival of one of the apartment owner’s friends leads him to see the sights with this man, a translator from Sweden.
This unhappy Paris visit mirrors an earlier abortive trip when Jane, having won a prize of a weekend break, invites Marie, as Lucien can not accompany her. Their destination is a small village in the north of England; their B&B is run by an odd couple. The first and only night’s sleep is spoiled by an unexpected visitor from the local asylum appearing at the window. Jane insists on returning to London.
That device, of an unexpected manifestation of a lost soul, is repeated in the Paris sequence when Daniel, Marie and the Swedish translator troop off to a chateau for a tour. There they surprise the unhappy owner. Marie pursues this man through the ruined building, and he strikes her in a clumsy gesture of defence.
Marie’s ability to survive her days is based on a careful choreography. She resents the time Daniel spends with the newcomer. “And so I did what I had always done best. I stood back and observed, withdrew into the quiet, neutral zone that felt comfortably familiar, registering voices and movements without interfering.” She knows what she wants yet does nothing.
Her failure to connect with anything, and the frequent art-history references and asides, leave the narrative suspended aimlessly.
Marie’s inertia is stifling. When informed of a death, she grabs at it in order to give her actions some relevance. This then causes her to destroy her collection.
Melancholic and overly dependent on set pieces and thin characterisation, Asunder is contrived and reads as a series of variations on a theme. The neat irony of Marie being cautioned by a gallery guard for standing too near a painting comes far too late to lift a tightly written, mannered and sophisticated narrative sustained by impressive control but none of the wit and lightness that so effortlessly grace Aridjis's superior debut.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
