Dialogue with a Somnambulist

Starred review from June 5, 2023
Mexican American writer Aridjis (Sea Monsters) conjures the strange and marvelous in this dazzling collection of stories and essays. In the magnificent title piece, which unfolds like a goth music video, the Berlin-based narrator follows a plastic bag “blown by a mysterious current” to a ramshackle bar filled with papier-mâché monsters and a wax giant with jealous tendencies. “Crustaceans” features a teenage boy looked after by his grandmother, who eats sea monkeys and disappears as suddenly as she appeared in his life. Insomnia is a recurring motif and provides fertile ground for Aridjis’s vast imagination. The protagonist of “In the Arms of Morpheus” is preoccupied by a chance encounter at a sleep-study clinic with another patient, while in the autobiographical essay “Kopfkino,” Aridjis describes moving to Berlin in 2003, where night felt “so laden with signals” she was hardly able to shut them out. The bulk of the nonfiction revolves around the beauty and tragedy of Mexico. In the standout piece “Baroque,” for example, Aridjis places the “unabashed theatricality” of the drug cartels’ violence in a centuries-old tradition of Mexican Baroque that emerged from clashes between Spanish, French, and Indigenous cultures and includes antagonistic expressions such as lucha libre. A surreal mood and intellectual heft sustain and unify the varied collection. Readers will eagerly turn the page to see where Aridjis takes them next.

June 15, 2023
A collection of fiction and nonfiction pieces by a Mexican American writer who lives in London. Divided into sections--stories, essays, and portraits--Aridjis' book troubles its own categories. Some stories read like philosophical essays or even poems, and none have anything resembling a conventional plot, while the subjects of her portraits often resemble mysterious characters standing at the thresholds of fictional worlds. In some cases, Aridjis revisits the same subjects in different forms. In the story "In the Arms of Morpheus," an insomniac spends the night at a sleep clinic where the staff insist that dreams are just "electrical discharges" and "there's little porosity between conscious and unconscious states," while in the essay "Kopfkino" (which in German literally means "mental cinema"), Aridjis, the author, living in Berlin, is deciding whether she'll treat her insomnia when she writes "In the Arms of Morpheus": "My senses were aware of some kind of continuum existing between the material world and the imaginary, the fantastical and the banal." That continuum is the subject of many of these pieces. "Into the Cosmos" explores the connections between aerial circus performers and Russian astronauts, the thrill of weightlessness, and the disorientation of being untethered from Earth. "Baroque" brings together lucha libre, or Mexican professional wrestling, and drug violence to show how each is an expression of the baroque in Mexico and its excesses and extremes. In a brief but stirring essay on stray dogs in Mexico, Aridjis points out that they're both iconic and overlooked. Though the dogs are often in motion, they don't have any particular destination. While some of the stories fall flat, the nonfiction pieces, including the portraits of famous and ordinary people, are treasures. Here, Aridjis' curiosity feels vast, her intelligence finely tuned to discover hidden connections, her playful, searching style capable of enlivening anything. Heady, marvelous work about the familiar and obscure.

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August 1, 2023
Aridjis' eclectic and entertaining collection of stories and essays is held together by various fascinations with circuses, wrestlers, lightning strikes, magic lanterns, storytelling, monsters, and urban spaces, including in London, Berlin, and her beloved Mexico City, which she describes as having a "natural bent for the strange and the marvelous." The same might be said of the author. In the title story, a woman's ex-boyfriend buys her a wax somnambulist that comes to life and demonstrates an annoying penchant for tidying. The story is funny, sexy, and, like most of Aridjis' work, seems from another time--one blessed with less technology and more introspection. What fascinating fun it is to take part in these rich observations and imaginings. The collection's nonfiction essays include loving portraits of artists (such as the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant) and unknowns (like an unhoused German woman living on the streets of Mexico City), as well as musings on politics, culture, and the parallels between cosmonauts and aerialists. The nonfiction pieces seem to illuminate Aridjis' fictional themes and motifs, encouraging the reader to start the book again.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.