Chloe Aridjis

Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin - seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea - are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, "Book of Clouds" is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

En un Berlín sombrío y como de ensueño, donde los fantasmas del pasado que moran en cada esquina están más vivos que la gente que pasea a diario por las calles, Tatiana, una joven mexicana, tras obtener una beca para la estancia de un año en la capital alemana aun con la cicatriz abierta de la reunificacion decide quedarse en esta ciudad que actua como un iman con ella y que se transforma en el refugio para huir de su vuelta a casa. Para sobrevivir se embarca en los mas variados y extraños trabajos, hasta dar con el doctor Weiss, un excentrico y solitario historiador que necesita a una persona que lo ayude a transcribir sus grabaciones de voz. Gracias a este, Tatiana conocera a Jonas, un meteorologo que busca en los continuos cambios de forma de las nubes un antidoto a la sombria realidad

Adrift in Berlin and with no desire to return home to Mexico, Tatiana cultivates solitude while trying to distance herself from the city's past. Yet the phantoms of Berlin - seeping in through the floorboards of her apartment, lingering in the abandoned subterranea - are more alive to her than the people she passes on her daily walks. When she takes a job transcribing notes for the reclusive historian Doktor Weiss, her life in Berlin becomes more complex. Through Weiss, she meets Jonas, a meteorologist who, as a child in the GDR, took solace in the sky's constant shape-shifting, an antidote to his unyielding and grim reality. As their three paths intersect and merge, the contours of all their worlds begin to change. Unfolding with the strange, charged logic of a dream, "Book of Clouds" is a haunting, beautifully drawn portrait of a city forever in flux, and of the myths we cling to in order to give shape to our lives. From a crowded U-Bahn where Hitler appears dressed as an old woman, to an underground Gestapo bowling alley whose walls bear score marks of games long settled, Chloe Aridjis guides us through Berlin with wit and compassion, showing why cities, like people, cannot outrun their pasts.

La poesía como máquina de maravillas y las máquinas maravillosas como objetos dotados de una poética racional. Durante el siglo XIX el alma romántica ardió en las cercanías del espíritu positivo y produjo nuevas formas –contradictorias, monstruosas, plenas de hallazgos mecánicos y literarios– de figurar al mundo. ¿En donde se encuentran el tiro de dados mallarmeano y la linterna mágica de Étienne-Gaspard Robertson? ¿La infernal alquimia de las vocales de Rimbaud con los autómatas de Jean- Eugène Robert-Houdin? En su Topografía de lo insólito, Chloe Aridjis medita sobre la maquinaria práctica y el andamiaje intelectual de los primeros ilusionistas y sus conexiones espirituales con un puñado de autores que transformaron la sensibilidad poética de la cultura occidental: Nerval, Balzac, Mallarmé, Rimbaud. El resultado de este cruce de información es una vista nueva y sorprendente del paisaje literario del siglo XIX francés, sin el cual nada se explica.

La segunda novela de Chloe Aridjis retrata la existencia contemplativa de Marie, guardia de seguridad de la National Gallery de Londres. Rodeada de pinturas, sus meditaciones la llevarán a obsesionarse con el significado de las grietas trazadas tanto en la superficie de los lienzos como en las emociones humanas. Sus cavilaciones se veran enfrentadas a raiz de un viaje a Francia en el que buscara comprender el deterioro que imprime el paso del tiempo en el vacio de la existencia.

Sea Monstersis a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth GreenwellOne autumn afternoon in Mexico City, 17-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 - and may also help her fulfil an unusual obsession: to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who have recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. They head for Zipolite, the 'Beach of the Dead', a community peopled by hippies, nudists, beach combers and eccentric storytellers, and Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will 'promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery'. But as she wanders the shoreline, she begins to discover that a quest is more easily envisioned than accomplished.And so unfolds a phantasmagorical tale of adolescence, transgression and disenchantment in late 1980s Mexico, a place of long nights, insistent sun and relentless rain.Sea Monstersis an intoxicating evocation of past selves and buried histories, the pull of fantasy colliding with the stark light of reality - a dreamlike yet vivid novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.