The Shadow of the Object - Chloe Aridjis
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis is the tenth book I've read from this year's Booker Prize longlist, and at this point I don't think I can talk about any of these books in isolation any more. The longlist feels really cohesive this year, in a way I don't think I've noticed before, with the same handful of preoccupations turning up again and again across wildly different books.
For me this one sits alongside May We Feed The King, The Renovators, and even The Vivisectors. All of them are books that are obsessed with the past, and with the way the past keeps bleeding into the present, refusing to stay where it's supposed to. There's a longing running through this longlist too, a kind of ache for some enchantment or magic that used to exist and doesn't any more. It's wistful. Almost nostalgic, but not quite, because nostalgia implies a kind of comfort and this doesn't offer that.
Longing is really the word at the forefront of my mind with The Shadow of the Object. Longing for connection, longing for something more, longing for enchantment. I'm aware I've used that word twice now, but you'll just have to allow it.
All the way through I kept waiting for it to tip over into magic realism. There's a texture to the prose that makes you feel like something fantastical is about to happen on the next page, some rupture in the ordinary world. It never quite does, though. This isn't a book that wants to give you the fantastic as spectacle. It's a book about finding the fantastic already sitting inside the mundane, if you know how to look for it. Objects here get charged with the energy of the people who owned them, carrying their histories around inside them long after the people themselves are gone.
It feels hauntological. It's a book about loss, about desire, about the slow work of coming to terms with your own mortality and the fact that there's no route back to the past, however much you might want one. All you can do is keep moving forward into whatever's next.
I haven't seen a huge amount of chatter about this one yet, which is a shame, because I loved it and I'd really like to talk to someone about it. I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, and I liked it slightly more than Helen of Nowhere, which was my other 8. That knocks Helen of Nowhere down a spot on my personal rankings, with The Shadow of the Object sliding into third.
So where that leaves things: my current top five are All Them Dogs, May We Feed The King, The Shadow of the Object, Helen of Nowhere, and The Renovators. I've still got John of John, Switzy, and The Disappearers left to go, so it'll be interesting to see whether this ranking survives contact with the rest of the list.
If you've read The Shadow of the Object, please tell me. I want to talk about it.