Sea Monsters

In a novel that won the Pen/Faulkner award and that reads like a poem, seventeen year old Luisa and her friend Tomás run away by bus from Mexico City to Oaxaca in search of Ukrainian dwarfs that have escaped from a Russian circus. Sea Monsters is a beautifully written series of magical, intertwined dreamscapes that wanders through late 80s music and technology and lush ocean landscapes, and where a young woman's imagination repeatedly bumps up against reality. Nothing is what it seems. Not the men she meets, not the beach where she sleeps, nor even the dwarfs that she is looking for.

Plot and character development are not the point here; language is. Aridjis examines the juxtaposition of what is expected and what is actual in carefully choreographed writing that reads like her description of a fugue: "...a melody consisting of opposing elements that interweave, two independent tunes that eventually join up and once merged turn into fugitives, fugitive notes that escape through the bars of their musical stave." In addition to the novel's structure this description could be applied to Luisa's relationships with Tomás, with the merman, with her father, and with her magical world.

What a wonderful and fascinating novel!

On the surface the story is simple. A young woman, Luisa, runs away from her home in Mexico City with a young man and she goes to a coastal city in Oaxaca called Zipolite. She is not very interested in the young man; she is not looking for a love story. She is not looking for an adventure. She wouldn’t have made that trip in the first place, if she hadn’t been stabled across a newspaper article about twelve Ukrainian dwarves who apparently found their way to Oaxaca after feeing a Soviet circus.

Luisa wants to discover more about life and life’s mysterious ways. The things she knows about life are the things she learned in her father’s library and from the discussions with him around the dinner table; shipwrecks and sea monsters, the title of the book. Society, for her, has the form of a fish tank, “only less beautiful to watch,” with lost objects at the bottom of the sea, that you can discover only if you scratch to surface.

And so Luisa runs away to the beach town of Zipolite where she spends her days in isolation “aimlessly, purposefully, and in search of digressions,” only to discover that the motives that drove her there are no longer interesting. She constantly redrafts her fantasies, projecting them to new characters that fascinated her, only, at the end, to be disappointed. It was there, in the soothing monotony of the sea beach that it occurred to her the most voyages and in failure, “and from the start we had set out for the wrong island, bypassing our destination, or at least the destination we thought we are aiming for….”

An absolutely beautiful, poetic and mesmerizing book.