The Shadow of the Object, the\u00a0new novel from Mexican-American author Chloe Aridjis, opens with an eruption of violence: Flora, a fortysomething woman, is visiting her mother and stepfather in Mexico City for the first time in many years when one evening, as she is bidding them goodnight, Diego \u2013 the\u00a0household\u2019s beloved guard dog \u2013 springs up and sinks his teeth into her hand. This unexpected incident is an assault not only on Flora\u2019s body, but also upon those delicate fictions that have, until now, shaped her life and swathed that body in an illusory sense of safety. The ageing alsatian, who had\u00a0lived until the instant of the attack\u00a0with \u201chis inner life and ours mysteriously, harmoniously, aligned\u201d, suddenly gazes up at the benevolent limb of his human benefactor and sees \u201can unsettling sight\u201d indeed: \u201cA hand out of context, unattached to a body \u2026\u00a0A hand gone rogue, no longer following orders from headquarters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Condemned to spend the rest of her\u00a0vacation confined to the winding corridors of a private hospital in Mexico City, Flora is ambivalent. On\u00a0the one hand, the environment is hardly stimulating \u2013 but on the other, \u201chospital stays offer a rare occasion to\u00a0check out \u2026 as a patient you are absolved of most responsibility, nothing expected of you except to mend\u201d. The hospital is life\u2019s waiting room, and it is during a languid midnight stroll of its corridors that she\u00a0meets Wilhelmina Blau, an elderly yet redoubtable German admitted with a bad case of pneumonia.<\/p>\n
Flora and Wilhelmina strike up a friendship, and during their nightly meetings in the hospital\u2019s dully lit hallways, Wilhelmina shares the ample wisdoms gleaned from her highly unconventional life. She tells Flora about her late husband and her son Max; she relates her childhood stays in a \u201cpreventorium\u201d situated in what had once been a Cistercian abbey; she describes her favourite exhibit in Mexico City\u2019s Museum of Anthropology (a human heart carved from greenstone, with \u201ca face, eyes, eyebrows and fangs\u201d, emitting \u201cas much malice as the most sanguinary gods\u201d). And \u2013 most consequentially \u2013 she describes for her new friend her now-dispersed collection of \u201cpre-cinema toys and instruments\u201d, once considered one of the greatest in the world: \u201cshelves and shelves of magic lanterns and peep boxes, long mirrors that returned sideshow reflections, zoetropes and phenakistoscopes, shadow puppets in every corner\u201d.<\/p>\n
double quotation markThis would be an immense achievement based on the strange beauty of its prose alone<\/p>\n
For Wilhelmina, the technologies of illusion illustrate \u201cthe persistence of vision \u2026 that human emotions are repeated, have but a finite number,\u201d and \u201chow the same gestures are repeated over the centuries in one vast theatre of the soul\u201d. She hosts a magic lantern show in her room for the breathlessly admiring Flora and a gaggle of nurses; as images of glowing angels and overgrown gardens and robed magicians ravish the hospital\u2019s sterile white walls, Flora and the nurses are utterly enraptured. Some days later, Wilhelmina succumbs to\u00a0her illness, and it falls to Flora to return her belongings \u2013 including the magic lantern \u2013 and cremated remains to Wilhelmina\u2019s son in London.<\/p>\n
Leaving aside the profundity of its themes, The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone: mirroring Wilhelmina\u2019s final magic lantern show, this slim and limber novella takes on an episodic structure as Flora returns to London and exchanges her burgeoning friendship with Wilhelmina for a hesitant sort of intimacy with her son.<\/p>\n
Aridjis is concerned with those seams of enchantment that suffuse our daily reality, and how the metamorphic potential of images made from light might demonstrate that \u201cno scene, no\u00a0existence\u201d is ever totally \u201cself-contained\u201d. Despite the weightiness of these ideas, her writing is deceptively pared back. In one scene, Flora and Max meet for a Sunday stroll on London\u2019s New River Path, and Flora\u2019s awareness of the history obscured beneath the cloudy water of the canal gives rise to a\u00a0kind of ecstasy that the tidy marvels of\u00a0Aridjis\u2019s prose can only provoke the reader to share in:<\/p>\n
To think that from this body of water containing soot and suicides and all other kinds of trauma, much of London used to drink. I sensed a hidden pact between everything, a density forced open in an instant. Winter branches wrote their foreign messages overhead. A blackbird. A wren. Birds who had stayed behind, not answering any\u00a0migratory call \u2026 Yet the human species appeared to be obeying some sort of winter brief, and for a long stretch it was only the wind that walked ahead of us.<\/p>\n
This is a fabulist\u2019s novel, but one in which any gothic excess is tempered by a profound humanity. Nothing so workaday as a plot could be imputed to this glowing, mythopoeic book. But I can only concur with Aridjis\u2019s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.<\/p>\n