Asunder - Paperback

by Chloe Aridjis (Author)

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.

After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

Front Jacket

From a writer praised for her "fresh, original voice" ("New York Times Book Review") and "hypnotic" prose (Junot Diaz) comes a captivating novel about two museum guards in London for whom life and art begin to overtake one another in unsettling and surreal ways.
Marie s job as a guard at the National Gallery offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.
"Asunder "is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.
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Back Jacket

Praise for Asunder:
Stunningly good . . . All the more powerful for being irreducible to a single theme . . . Dramatic and affecting, completely coherent and oddly irresistible . . . A brilliant book." Publishers Weekly, starred review
There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay . . . It is the work of an addicted image-maker who fills her cabinet of curiosities and then adds some more . . . [Asunder] thrills with energy. The Guardian (UK)
Brilliantly exact and disconcerting, Asunder exists with an intensity stronger than that of most novels. Reading it is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination." Diana Athill, author of Stet and Somewhere Towards the End
Exhilarating. Powerful and artful, Asunder works like a poem, pulling us into a labyrinthine sequence of connected images. Aridjis requires us to be active, playful readers . . . [but] at the same time we yield to the novel's insistent flow, its currents and eddies of sensual thought. This all makes for rapturous and enraptured reading. The Independent (UK)
"Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange . . . This is deft and shimmering fiction." Times Literary Supplement

MARINER
www.marinerbooks.com
$13.95
ISBN 978-0-544-00346-0
Fiction

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Author Biography

"Asunder" is her second novel.