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A review by lokroma
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis
4.0
In a novel that won the Pen/Faulkner award and that reads like a poem, seventeen year old Luisa and her friend Tomás run away by bus from Mexico City to Oaxaca in search of Ukrainian dwarfs that have escaped from a Russian circus. Sea Monsters is a beautifully written series of magical, intertwined dreamscapes that wanders through late 80s music and technology and lush ocean landscapes, and where a young woman's imagination repeatedly bumps up against reality. Nothing is what it seems. Not the men she meets, not the beach where she sleeps, nor even the dwarfs that she is looking for.
Plot and character development are not the point here; language is. Aridjis examines the juxtaposition of what is expected and what is actual in carefully choreographed writing that reads like her description of a fugue: "...a melody consisting of opposing elements that interweave, two independent tunes that eventually join up and once merged turn into fugitives, fugitive notes that escape through the bars of their musical stave." In addition to the novel's structure this description could be applied to Luisa's relationships with Tomás, with the merman, with her father, and with her magical world.
Plot and character development are not the point here; language is. Aridjis examines the juxtaposition of what is expected and what is actual in carefully choreographed writing that reads like her description of a fugue: "...a melody consisting of opposing elements that interweave, two independent tunes that eventually join up and once merged turn into fugitives, fugitive notes that escape through the bars of their musical stave." In addition to the novel's structure this description could be applied to Luisa's relationships with Tomás, with the merman, with her father, and with her magical world.