Article #7791

This fable-like novella about technologies of illusion and a life-changing friendship in Mexico City is enchanting

The Shadow of the Object, the new 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 – the household’s beloved guard dog – springs up and sinks his teeth into her hand. This unexpected incident is an assault not only on Flora’s 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 lived until the instant of the attack with “his inner life and ours mysteriously, harmoniously, aligned”, suddenly gazes up at the benevolent limb of his human benefactor and sees “an unsettling sight” indeed: “A hand out of context, unattached to a body … A hand gone rogue, no longer following orders from headquarters.”

Condemned to spend the rest of her vacation confined to the winding corridors of a private hospital in Mexico City, Flora is ambivalent. On the one hand, the environment is hardly stimulating – but on the other, “hospital stays offer a rare occasion to check out … as a patient you are absolved of most responsibility, nothing expected of you except to mend”. The hospital is life’s waiting room, and it is during a languid midnight stroll of its corridors that she meets Wilhelmina Blau, an elderly yet redoubtable German admitted with a bad case of pneumonia.