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Dialogue with a Somnambulist: Stories, Essays & a Portrait Gallery
Renowned internationally for her lyrically unsettling novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, the Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis crosses borders in her work as much as she traverses them in life. Now, collected here for the first time, her stories, essays and pen portraits reveal an author as imaginatively at home in the short form as in her longer fiction.
At once fabular and formally innovative, acquainted with reverie and rigorous report, sensitive to the needs of a wider ecology yet familiar with the landscapes of the unconscious, her texts are both dream dispatches and wayward word plays infused with the pleasure and possibilities of language. Conversations with the presences who dwell on the threshold of waking and reverie, flâneuses of the dusk and dawn, these pieces will stay with you long after the lamps have flickered out.
At once fabular and formally innovative, acquainted with reverie and rigorous report, sensitive to the needs of a wider ecology yet familiar with the landscapes of the unconscious, her texts are both dream dispatches and wayward word plays infused with the pleasure and possibilities of language. Conversations with the presences who dwell on the threshold of waking and reverie, flâneuses of the dusk and dawn, these pieces will stay with you long after the lamps have flickered out.
280 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
16 people are currently reading
2138 people want to read
About the author
Chloe Aridjis
26 books150 followersChloe Aridjis was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico City. After receiving a BA from Harvard, she went on to receive a PhD from Oxford University. A collection of essays on Magic and Poetry in Nineteenth-century France was released in 2005. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, followed in 2009, winning the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 30, 2023
Chloe Aridjis’ Dialogue with a Somnambulist is a wonderfully spooky maze of dreams, illusions, and otherworldly nocturnal experiences spread across stories, essays, and musings on art and culture. The collection opens with a bang of a tale about a mysterious speakeasy populated with hipster monsters and a waxen statue who lives in her protagonist’s closet. The following stories are just as witty, original, and immediately absorbing: some are narratives in the form of weather reports and news story ledes; others are centered on strange groups of people linked by curious circumstances or interests, like lightning strike victims, insomniacs, and Kafka enthusiasts. The labyrinthine peculiarity of her stories conjures an obvious comparison to the Czech writer himself, but they also feel akin to the magical realism of Murakami and the dreamlike qualities of the stories of Barbara Molinard.
Aridjis’ essays, then, mirror and parallel her stories. She chronicles her struggles with insomnia that prompted a visit to a sleep clinic in an essay that is a sort of behind-the-scenes look at an earlier short story, in which her protagonist does the same (with more surrealistic results). The piece also provides insight into her writing inspiration; she explains that as a sleepless creature, “night had… seeped into everything I’d written” and that writing became an “attempt at addressing whatever it was that had in me in its grip.”
These lines feel like a crucial window into the entire collection: Aridjis’ curiosity about her own condition explains her interest in how other extreme experiences bend and shape the human mind. One of her essays focuses on daredevil tightrope walkers whose jobs require that they suspend fear in order to perform tricks at precipitous heights; another, one of the most fascinating pieces in the book, is about the effects of space, isolation, and claustrophobia on the minds of Soviet cosmonauts, and the hangover effects of those experiences upon their reacclimatization to terrestrial life. She also examines the national psychoses and neuroses of her home country, Mexico, in reflecting on the baroque tradition inherent in lucha libre culture and the factors that transformed Mexican life to one of drugs and bloodshed over the past few decades. In one of her most personal and touching pieces, “The Tension of Transience,” she relates her experience as a teenager on the precipice of adulthood to her nation on the edge of violent transformation. “What I didn’t know at the time,” she writes, “was how bleak things would become, and how the aesthetic of our cultural choices somehow foreshadowed the events to unfold — still unfolding — in our country.”
The final third of the book, entitled “Portrait Gallery” and composed of brief pieces on artists writers Aridjis admires and, in some cases, acquainted herself with, provides some interesting insight into her sources of inspiration, but it pales in comparison to the rest of the collection. The best of these is the final piece, a slightly rewritten history of the world, in which humanity triumphs time and again, preventing catastrophe and destruction. It is an apt finale, for throughout these wide-ranging stories and essays, Aridjis always manages to hold that connective thread, forever circling back to the vulnerability of the human condition and the unique mind that generates and tolerates such intensity and constant transformation.
Aridjis’ essays, then, mirror and parallel her stories. She chronicles her struggles with insomnia that prompted a visit to a sleep clinic in an essay that is a sort of behind-the-scenes look at an earlier short story, in which her protagonist does the same (with more surrealistic results). The piece also provides insight into her writing inspiration; she explains that as a sleepless creature, “night had… seeped into everything I’d written” and that writing became an “attempt at addressing whatever it was that had in me in its grip.”
These lines feel like a crucial window into the entire collection: Aridjis’ curiosity about her own condition explains her interest in how other extreme experiences bend and shape the human mind. One of her essays focuses on daredevil tightrope walkers whose jobs require that they suspend fear in order to perform tricks at precipitous heights; another, one of the most fascinating pieces in the book, is about the effects of space, isolation, and claustrophobia on the minds of Soviet cosmonauts, and the hangover effects of those experiences upon their reacclimatization to terrestrial life. She also examines the national psychoses and neuroses of her home country, Mexico, in reflecting on the baroque tradition inherent in lucha libre culture and the factors that transformed Mexican life to one of drugs and bloodshed over the past few decades. In one of her most personal and touching pieces, “The Tension of Transience,” she relates her experience as a teenager on the precipice of adulthood to her nation on the edge of violent transformation. “What I didn’t know at the time,” she writes, “was how bleak things would become, and how the aesthetic of our cultural choices somehow foreshadowed the events to unfold — still unfolding — in our country.”
The final third of the book, entitled “Portrait Gallery” and composed of brief pieces on artists writers Aridjis admires and, in some cases, acquainted herself with, provides some interesting insight into her sources of inspiration, but it pales in comparison to the rest of the collection. The best of these is the final piece, a slightly rewritten history of the world, in which humanity triumphs time and again, preventing catastrophe and destruction. It is an apt finale, for throughout these wide-ranging stories and essays, Aridjis always manages to hold that connective thread, forever circling back to the vulnerability of the human condition and the unique mind that generates and tolerates such intensity and constant transformation.
July 13, 2023
These gorgeous, dreamy fragments (are they short stories? personal essays? critiques?) transported me through time and space. Preoccupied with the scenery of Mexico and Germany, the Baroque, the absurd, exile, loneliness, and creativity, these innovative pieces struck a chord in me that I didn't expect. My favorite story was "In the Arms of Morpheus," in which two ruminative insomniacs in a mysterious sleep study pass like ships in the night. I loved the relationship it built with the essay "Kopfinko," about author Chloe Aridjis' own lifelong insomnia. This is an author I'm eager to read more from, and I'm grateful to Catapult for the ARC.
October 8, 2023
The pieces in Chloe Aridjis’ Dialogue with a Somnambulist exist in that disorientating realm between waking and sleep, where dreams and nightmares permeate reality, unsettling, yet strangely comforting (or maybe that’s just me). Throughout this collection of stories and essays, Aridjis draws from her outsiderness—sometimes she is the insomniac German Expressionist finding comradery with other shadowy specters including a somnambulist, Kafka devotees, circus fleas, and other sleepless wanderers of the night; other times she is a trapeze artist defying the boundaries of time, language, and culture in her essays, about soviet cosmonauts, Berlin, Mavis Gallant, Beatrice Hastings, and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; more often she is both, as in her pieces about Mexican baroque and goth, Mexican street dogs, and surrealist queen Leonora Carrington. For a week, my weirdness found a nook in Chloe Aridjis’ world and I think that the best way to greet October’s wondrous return.
“Winter has the city in its grip and at three forty-five the streetlights crackle back on, throwing a tenuous light onto everything. Lean days, little hanging to them apart from long shadows and stubborn leaves, days that become hard to measure once November arrives. Yet this has always been my favourite time of year, when a certain solitude floats through the air and from one moment to the next everything falls silent, apart from the graffiti.”
“How to map this darkness? One might argue that in the end both outer space and inner space are destined to remain shrouded in mystery and ultimately unknowable–and unconquerable. We may undertake new voyages, assign coordinates, put names to the visible and the invisible, yet it is elusive territory to which we simply give form and measurement; wherever he finds himself, man's impulse is to limn his own mortal routes.”
“[Leonora Carrington’s] home in Mexico City was a chessboard of Mexican sunlight and European shadow - much of the house was stone-chilly and austere, but then you'd step into a patch of sun or come face-to-face with one of her sculptures, an eruption of life emerging from the murk.”
“Looking back, nearly everything about the scene felt ephemeral. A baroque ephemeral. The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin once described the baroque as an expression above all of the tension of transience' - one shouldn't expect perfection or fulfilment from the baroque, he claimed, nor the static calm of being. Only the unrest of change.”
“Winter has the city in its grip and at three forty-five the streetlights crackle back on, throwing a tenuous light onto everything. Lean days, little hanging to them apart from long shadows and stubborn leaves, days that become hard to measure once November arrives. Yet this has always been my favourite time of year, when a certain solitude floats through the air and from one moment to the next everything falls silent, apart from the graffiti.”
“How to map this darkness? One might argue that in the end both outer space and inner space are destined to remain shrouded in mystery and ultimately unknowable–and unconquerable. We may undertake new voyages, assign coordinates, put names to the visible and the invisible, yet it is elusive territory to which we simply give form and measurement; wherever he finds himself, man's impulse is to limn his own mortal routes.”
“[Leonora Carrington’s] home in Mexico City was a chessboard of Mexican sunlight and European shadow - much of the house was stone-chilly and austere, but then you'd step into a patch of sun or come face-to-face with one of her sculptures, an eruption of life emerging from the murk.”
“Looking back, nearly everything about the scene felt ephemeral. A baroque ephemeral. The Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin once described the baroque as an expression above all of the tension of transience' - one shouldn't expect perfection or fulfilment from the baroque, he claimed, nor the static calm of being. Only the unrest of change.”
November 4, 2024
really interesting and reminded me that you can and should write various iterations of “the same story” over and over again. most of the stories here are about a woman with insomnia and they all come out in vastly different and beautiful ways!!
September 29, 2023
Strong storylines in the essay pieces. I enjoyed them. Aridjis has talent for strong development of her characters and turning slice -of-life into a universal message/theme.
October 27, 2022
3.5 rounded down - like half of this book I really got, absolutely loved it, totally on board. The other half... Maybe it just went over my head, but there were parts I really struggled to connect with
April 22, 2024
This is an admirable collection of varied writings (short stories, essays and portraits of real individuals). I liked some of it, and found some of the reading a bit of a chore.
In the end, I was more impressed with Aridjis than I was with the book. She seems a person of depth and insight, and I found myself envying the life she has led. The writings are drawn from her life experiences in Mexico, Berlin and London, and she has a compelling cosmopolitan outlook.
I liked the portraits best, especially those on Beatrice Hastings, Margaret Aberlin and Patricia Sigl. And the portraits briefly acquaint the reader with other people of consequence: Modigliani, Trotsky, Andre Breton, Mavis Gallant and Leonora Carrington. I can't say I got much out of the essays, though "World Weather Report" is effectively humorous. Half the stories are pretty good: the one which gives it's title to the volume, "The Kafka Society" (which Kafka would probably have liked), and "In the Arms of Morpheus.
So, yes, this is worth reading, though it engaged me more intellectually than emotionally. It is not always effective, but I am impressed that I have never read anything like this. The literary collage does provide the reader with a real sense of who the author is and what matters to her.
In the end, I was more impressed with Aridjis than I was with the book. She seems a person of depth and insight, and I found myself envying the life she has led. The writings are drawn from her life experiences in Mexico, Berlin and London, and she has a compelling cosmopolitan outlook.
I liked the portraits best, especially those on Beatrice Hastings, Margaret Aberlin and Patricia Sigl. And the portraits briefly acquaint the reader with other people of consequence: Modigliani, Trotsky, Andre Breton, Mavis Gallant and Leonora Carrington. I can't say I got much out of the essays, though "World Weather Report" is effectively humorous. Half the stories are pretty good: the one which gives it's title to the volume, "The Kafka Society" (which Kafka would probably have liked), and "In the Arms of Morpheus.
So, yes, this is worth reading, though it engaged me more intellectually than emotionally. It is not always effective, but I am impressed that I have never read anything like this. The literary collage does provide the reader with a real sense of who the author is and what matters to her.
November 13, 2023
When I’d bought this I assumed it was more interested in reality than fiction. But Aridjis enjoys exploring fiction a little more than I’d like. That’s why ‘In the Arms of Morpheus’ is particularly good, made better by the essay on Aridjis’ insomnia and the true story behind that short fiction.
Every failed fiction writer’s greatest enemy is economy. They can’t tame it. And editors can’t be bothered getting it tight enough. As I was reading ‘Morpheus’ I was cutting the dialogue to half length and it was way more effective. Honestly VUP should hire me as an editor so we’ll have a striking period of effective fiction literature.
So the essays make up the valuable content of this book. Aridjis surrenders all she knows to us. An interesting perspective on astronaut psychology. The comparison of the classic sad lonely clown to the lonely oppressed astronaut. The only thing that ruins the image is the lack of emotive makeup, though I suppose the lack of noise has the same effect in a different way. True, we should remake a sad clown movie of the past as a deep space adventure! Not ‘Joker’ though.
‘Tension of Transience’ is a cool portrait of alt. Mexican youth.
Every failed fiction writer’s greatest enemy is economy. They can’t tame it. And editors can’t be bothered getting it tight enough. As I was reading ‘Morpheus’ I was cutting the dialogue to half length and it was way more effective. Honestly VUP should hire me as an editor so we’ll have a striking period of effective fiction literature.
So the essays make up the valuable content of this book. Aridjis surrenders all she knows to us. An interesting perspective on astronaut psychology. The comparison of the classic sad lonely clown to the lonely oppressed astronaut. The only thing that ruins the image is the lack of emotive makeup, though I suppose the lack of noise has the same effect in a different way. True, we should remake a sad clown movie of the past as a deep space adventure! Not ‘Joker’ though.
‘Tension of Transience’ is a cool portrait of alt. Mexican youth.
February 4, 2024
New favorite. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, cosmonauts, Kafka obsessives, Leonora Carrington, lightning strike survivors-she’s kindred spirit. Smart and dark without being dry or dense. The stories, essays, and portraits were equally enjoyable.
June 8, 2024
chloe aridjis, with your cosmic constellation brain you have shared with us something marvelous
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October 18, 2024Some intriguing writing. Lightly magical realist fiction and non-fiction that combines art history and personal journalism.
January 6, 2025
4.5 stars
October 30, 2025
maybe i'd like her novels better
December 19, 2021
Aridjis fuses the explosive restlessness of pop culture with the elegance of highbrow restraint to create new and subversive cultural forms. Hybrid currents collide and coalesce in bizarre refractions of expressionist horror film, surrealist painting, Mexican wrestling, insomnia, hypnotism, dwarfs and even some of the comic book novelties that sprang from fetid business brain of mail order millionaire Harold Braunhut. This isn’t just literary slippage, it’s a landslide of subtle laughs and extraordinary artistic innovation.
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December 27, 2023I almost gave up on it very early in -- I have a lot of books on my to-read list and the first few pages started to put me off -- but I'm glad I stuck with it. I don't think you'll find a better collection by a Mexican-American goth living in London.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews