Chloe Aridjis | |
|---|---|
 Aridjis reading fromBook of Clouds | |
| Born | New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality |
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| Alma mater | Harvard University University of Oxford |
| Period | Contemporary |
| Genre | |
| Notable works | Book of Clouds (2009) Asunder (2013) Sea Monsters (2019) Dialogue With a Somnambulist (2021, 2023) |
| Notable awards | Prix du Premier Roman Étranger (2009) PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2020) Prado Museum Writing the Prado Residency (2023) |
| Relatives |
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| Website | |
| www | |
Chloe Aridjis (born 1971) is a Mexican and American novelist and writer. Her novelBook of Clouds (2009) was published in eight countries, and won thePrix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her second novel,Asunder was published in 2013 to unanimous acclaim.[1] Her third novel,Sea Monsters (2019), was awarded thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020.[2] She is the eldest daughter of Mexican poet and diplomatHomero Aridjis and American Betty F. de Aridjis, an environmental activist and translator. She is the sister of film makerEva Aridjis. She has a doctorate in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic from theUniversity of Oxford.[3]
Born inNew York City, Chloe Aridjis grew up inMexico City and theNetherlands, where her father served as Mexico's ambassador. Aridjis studied comparative literature atHarvard University and wrote a thesis on "Night and the Poetic Self" inCharles Baudelaire'sLes Fleurs du mal at theUniversity of Oxford, under the supervision ofMalcolm Bowie before completing a doctorate on "the interface between high and popular art in nineteenth-century France with a special focus on the relationship between poetry, magic shows and literature of the fantastic".[4][5] As a teenager she had a bilingual exposure to pop in Mexico City, listening to British bands while discovering their Mexican equivalents at a gaygoth club.[6]
She met greatpoets such asJorge Luis Borges andTed Hughes at international poetry festivals her parents organised in the early 1980s. This had a lasting effect on Aridjis, who maintained a correspondence with several of them throughout her adolescence.[4] Her favourite authors includeNikolai Gogol,Samuel Beckett,Thomas Bernhard,Franz Kafka,Miguel de Cervantes,Edgar Allan Poe,Horacio Quiroga, Charles Baudelaire,[7]Gérard de Nerval,Stéphane Mallarmé,Arthur Rimbaud,Walter Benjamin,Robert Walser,[4]Gaston Bachelard,Comte de Lautréamont andRené Daumal.[8]
Her book of essays onMagic and the Literary Fantastique in Nineteenth-Century France was published in 2002. Her doctoral thesis was published in Spanish asTopografía de lo insólito: La magia y lo fantástico literario en la Francia del siglo XIX (Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico, 2005).[4] She publishes in journals and newspapers in England,Mexico, among them essays forGranta on insomnia and the psychological fallout of space travel on Soviet cosmonauts.[9] Aridjis lived inBerlin for five years, and currently resides inLondon. She has been vegetarian since 1986.[4]
Herdebut novelBook of Clouds was published in the US byGrove Press in winter 2009, and byChatto and Windus in the UK in July 2009, in the Netherlands, and byMercure de France in September 2009. It was published in Mexico, Spain,Romania andCroatia in 2011 and as a graphic novel in French in early 2012. In his review ofBook of Clouds forThe Independent,Daniel Hahn described it as an "exceptional debut novel".[10] InThe New York Times,Wendy Lesser described it as "a stunningly accurate portrait of Berlin".[11]Regina Marler in theLos Angeles Times drew attention to Aridjis's "magic and poetry", and described "an unsettling atmosphere unlike anything in recent fiction."[12]In November 2009,Book of Clouds won thePrix du Premier Roman Étranger in France.[13]
Her second novel,Asunder, was published in May 2013 by Chatto and Windus inLondon, and in September byHoughton Mifflin Harcourt in New York City.[6] The novel concerns two museum guards, one at theNational Gallery in London, for whom life and art begin to overtake each other in surreal and unsettling ways.[14] It involves a trip toParis, and carefully contained worlds torn apart.[15] TheTimes Literary Supplement wrote of it: "Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange ... This is deft and shimmering fiction";The Guardian described the novel as "Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing ... thrills with energy."[16]
Her third novel,Sea Monsters, was published in February 2019.The New Yorker referred to it as "a hypnotic narrative of disenchantment",[17] whileThe Atlantic called it "a strange symbolist novel that would make Mallarmé proud"[18] and wrote: "Like a magician, Aridjis is obsessed with elusiveness; like a symbolist, she far prefers imagination and metaphor to plain sight."[18]Sea Monsters won thePEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020.[19]
Aridjis was awarded aGuggenheim Fellowship in 2014.[20] In 2020, she was awarded the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award for her forthcoming novel entitledReports from the Land of the Bats.[21] In the same year, she was elected aFellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[22]
She was co-curator of theLeonora Carrington exhibition atTate Liverpool that opened in March 2015[23] and she occasionally writes forfrieze[24] and other art journals. In 2018 she starred in Josh Appignanesi's arthouse film "Female Human Animal."[25]
In February 2016, her English translation of her father's bookThe Child Poet was published.[26]
Aridjis is a member of Writers Rebel, a group of writers that focuses on the climate emergency. She is particularly interested in issues involving species extinction, and animal welfare in general.[27][28]
She dares add one more straining element because she knows that her novel – like the paintings she most admires – will be more intensely alive the more it seems to be just on the verge of falling apart.
