A review by emilyinparis
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

emotional lighthearted mysterious reflective fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

‘The shoreline ran through every face, destroying some, enhancing others’ 

‘He had started out as a snag, a snag in the composition; from one moment to the next, there was no other way of putting it, he had begun to appear in my life back in the city. And since all appearances are ultimately disturbances, this disturbance needed investigating’ 

‘He was a sliver of black slicing through the so-called calm of the morning’ 

‘Far away a tectonic plate had decided to shift and with its shifting that Thursday morning it dispatched a telegram that swayed, toppled and razed all we’d taken for granted’ 

‘I would return to the Baudelaire poem, trying to approach it from different angles to see whether a little more light might enter the landscape’ 

‘I thought back on the Baudelaire poem and what it seemed to say, how to imagine travel is probably better than actually travelling since no journey can ever satisfy human desire, as soon as one sets out, fantasies get tangled in the rigging and dark birds of doubt begin their circling overhead’

‘The bold hum of voices, mostly male, rose and fell around me, everyone talking and thought-walking like Cantinflas, their voices expansive, compulsive, filling every inch of air. And soon I too felt charged, charged and restive and impervious to everything’ 

‘I said goodbye to the sleeping creatures and left the others to their fine white lines while El Putiflo recited his’

‘A white electricity ran through me, as if my system had been rewired by an evil technician’

‘I closed my eyes, slightly aroused by the water’s embrace, its invisible arms wrapping around my legs’

‘And yet I only saw these men from afar, they never came into focus, they remained patches of ink in the background’ 

‘Meanwhile the ocean continued to write and rewrite its long ribbon of foam, changing the contours of Tomás’ drawing’ 

‘I would think of the Zapotec girls, wondering on what stretch of beach, exactly, their corpses had been laid out’ 

‘the hammock sagged closer to the sand, its cords stretching and threatening to unravel, a drop in pressure, a rise in pressure, a riding of the waves, a journey to the seabed, a thrust back up to the surface, and something within me coiled tighter and tighter until it could coil no more abc then sprang undone. The merman remained with me until the early hours of the morning’

‘Gustavo in his lancha, while the merman sat at our table in the bar—in the past twenty-four hours they’d split into separate entities’