Description
Book SynopsisMarie's job as a museum guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belie their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the warder who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn apart.
Trade ReviewI loved Chloe Aridjis's
Book of Clouds so it was exciting to read her new novel,
Asunder, which, in
a story about art, guardianship, damage and philosophy, revealed again
the deftness and depth of narrative understanding of this subtle and courageous writer. -- Ali Smith * New Statesman *
Exhilarating… The novel wonderfully disobeys all conventional rules of realism and plotting, of show-don't-tell.
Powerful and artful, Asunder works like a poem, pulling us into a labyrinthine sequence of connected images. By the end, it seems like an abstract painting, apparently defying narrative time.
This all makes for rapturous and enraptured reading. -- Michele Roberts * Independent *
Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing… This is a book about quietness and violence.
There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay.
Her novel thrills with energy because of it. -- Alexandra Harris * Guardian *
Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange. To describe her novels as inconsequential is not to deny them substance, but to highlight their shadowy randomness, their pearlescent impressionism and the way in which they work by hints and cross-references...
this is deft and shimmering fiction. -- Kate McLoughlin * Times Literary Supplement *
Aridjis has risen to the occasion with
Asunder. Given that
Asunder lacks a conventional plot, the fact that it is such
an absorbing and moving book says much about Aridjis's skill as a writer.
Her unusual imagery and lyrical style breathe life into this otherwise sombre story. * Financial Times *
