Sea Monsters, Chloe Aridjis
Sea Monsters, Chloe Aridjis
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Sea Monsters
A Novel

Author: Chloe Aridjis

Narrator: Justine Eyre

Unabridged: 4 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/05/2019

Synopsis

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. Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.

About Chloe Aridjis

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican American writer based in London. She is the author of three novels: Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France; Asunder, set in London's National Gallery; and Sea Monsters, which was awarded the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Aridjis has written for various art journals and was guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer's Award in 2020. Aridjis is a founding member of XR Writers Rebel (writersrebel.com), a group of writers who focus on addressing biodiversity loss and the climate emergency.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Doug

Although readable, and easily knocked out in a day, this just left me feeling kind of 'meh'. The story just ambles along and I'm not quite sure what it was trying to say - or even if there WAS any point. And although some of Aridjis' prose was quite lovely, at almost no point was I convinced it was......more

Goodreads review by Claire

All thoughts on this need to be prefaced with the understanding that I have a very high tolerance for plotlessness in novel. Sea Monsters is exactly that, essentially plotless. A teenage girl decides to run away to the coast in Mexico, with a boy she barely knows. What happens to her there, or what......more

Goodreads review by Meike

Chloe Aridjis' powerful evocation of Mexico is the real star of this mesmerizing novel: 17-year-old Luisa falls in love with the enigmatic 19-year-old Tomás, and together, they run away from Mexico City to the beach community of Zipolite on the southern coast of Oaxaca. Aridjis herself grew up in Me......more

Goodreads review by luce (cry baby)

/ / / Read more reviews on my blog / / / In spite of its lively premise and its lovely cover art Sea Monsters is one of the most lacklustre books I've read this year. Thankfully, Sea Monsters is a slight novel, just around 200 pages. Then again, those 200 pages are a drag. The summary for this novel i......more

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