A review by shimmer
Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

5.0

Chloe Aridjis' first novel, Book of Clouds, featured a lyrical, deeply engaging narrative voice but ultimately left me feeling like it hadn't quite "gone" anywhere (which wasn't dissatisfying). Her second, Asunder, is equally if not more lush in its prose but this time the novel — while hardly plot- or event-driven — does more with the many images, ideas, and tensions set in motion. Narrator Marie works as a museum guard in London's National Gallery, a life she has chosen for the way it allows her to exist in the margins of being near to but not herself being subject to notice. Marie, and Asunder, are very much concerned with the weight of gazes (upon bodies and artworks alike, particularly the masculine gaze upon women in both regards) and how they pin down, distort, and destroy what they take in. The novel creates a strange sensation of gazing in its own right, because while not much "happens" the prose takes on its momentum and made me often ask, "What am I looking at here? Why is this 'nothing' under my readerly gaze so engaging?" Those same questions arose as I read Aridjis' earlier book, but this time, in her second, the novel delivers more powerfully upon them.