The Shadow of the Object (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis, and mortality.

Before publishing her first novel Book of Clouds in 2009, Chloe Aridjis studied and wrote on poetry, magic shows, and the literature of the fantastic in nineteenth-century France. Her new novel, The Shadow of the Object, traverses a strange landscape between Mexico and London; contemporary desire and earlier technologies of illusion.

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in the hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The  two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.

 When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewelery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican and American novelist and writer. Her books include Book of Clouds (2009), Asunder (2013) and Sea Monsters (2019), winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her story and essay collection Dialogue with a Somnambulist was published in 2021. She writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. She lives in London.