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    Sea Monsters: A Novel
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    Sea Monsters: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Sea Monsters: A Novel
    Ebook171 pages3 hours

    Sea Monsters: A Novel

    By Chloe Aridjis

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle-class upbringing for a quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is “a surreal, captivating tale about the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression, and its inevitable disappointments” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

    One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence.

    Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.”

    Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

    "Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends meaning below every surface. Like Sebald’s or Cusk’s, her haunted writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see this book, which is self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea." ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

    Editor's Note

    Award winner…

    “Sea Monsters” won the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. “Set against spectacular Oaxacan landscapes and full of surrealist possibilities, ‘Sea Monsters’ is a stunning exploration of the ways its brilliant teenage narrator’s interior and exterior worlds are both fluid and in opposition. This dreamlike near-fable of equal parts philosophical and intellectual vigor is a book unlike any other,” the judges wrote.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatapult
    Release dateFeb 5, 2019
    ISBN9781948226042
    Author

    Chloe Aridjis

    Chloe Aridjis is the author of three three novels— Book of Clouds, Asunder, and Sea Monsters— and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and, more recently, the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award. Chloe is a member of XR WRITERS REBEL and is particularly interested in issues involving animal welfare.

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    Reviews for Sea Monsters

    3/5

    32 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This book had me feeling “meh” and it took a while for me to get into it. The story is about 17 year-old Luisa’s adventure and a boy she meets, Tomás. Not a whole lot happens in this book and it had me going “was I that dumb at 17?”
    • 2/5
      That just did not pay off. I was kinda behind the ennui for a while, but it didn't really go anywhere. Baffled by the father's overindulgent monologue at the end. The home metaphors seemed a bit heavy handed. Ah well.
    • 5/5
      A great read about growing in Mexico city in the 80s. Klaus Nomi, the antikythera mechanism, and defecting soviet dwarfs? Yes.