Winner of the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this intoxicating
story of a teenage girl who trades her a middle-class upbringing for a
quest for meaning in 1980s Mexico is "a surreal, captivating tale about
the power of a youthful imagination, the lure of teenage transgression,
and its inevitable disappointments" (Los Angeles Review of Books).
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not
return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast
with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her
life is lacking―recklessness, impulse, independence.
Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to
track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to
newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring
Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa's surreal
dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by
hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa
searches for someone, anyone, who will "promise, no matter what, to
remain a mystery." It is a quest more easily envisioned than
accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar,
Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on
Zipolite, the "Beach of the Dead."
Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A
mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Set to a
pulsing soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the
Banshees, Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about
the moments and mysteries that shape us.
Aridjis is deft at conjuring the teenage swooniness that apprehends
meaning below every surface. Like Sebald's or Cusk's, her haunted
writing patrols its own omissions . . . The figure of the shipwreck
looms large for Aridjis. It becomes a useful lens through which to see
this book, which is self-contained, inscrutable, and weirdly
captivating, like a salvaged object that wants to return to the sea.
―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
