Sea Monsters

SEA MONSTERS

by Chloe Aridjis

 

Award: PEN/Faulkner Winner 2020

 

Date Read: October 19, 2023

 

Luisa is a girl of 17 living in Mexico with her parents. She is about to graduate from high school but her life is yet to begin. When she meets an intriguing stranger, Tomas, she becomes enamored with him and upon their third meeting, she begins to believe a relationship is possible. Luisa is also fixated on a troupe of Ukrainian dwarves who have escaped from a Soviet circus touring in Mexico and she wants to go and find them. The last she had heard they were in Oaxaca.

 

Luisa is able to convince Tomas that running away to Oaxaca is a good idea. Essentially running away from home, she and Tomas board a bus for the seaside town of Zipolite. I’m never quite sure if she believes she and Tomas have a future or if she knows the only thing they share is a taste in alternative music (e.g. Joy Division, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) of the late 80s. On the bus down, they hardly speak to each other, Luisa opting to listen to her Walkman.

 

Upon reflection, the male characters hardly speak in this novel, neither Tomas nor Gustavo, the man she later meets in the Oaxaca bar. Quickly, Luis is aware that Tomas is regretting his decision to accompany Luisa on this fool’s errand. He almost immediately ditches her and rather than panic, she is mystified. Eventually, they are reunited but Luisa realizes any romantic notion she had is completely ruined.

 

She quickly meets a guy she has noticed before building sandcastles; a man she dubs the merman. Believing they have a language or cultural barrier, the merman never really speaks to her but Luisa unloads her entire saga of Tomas on him. After a great deal of mixed signals, he takes her to bed. I’m not sure if this is her first time or not, but she still doesn’t know his name.

 

The next day after sleeping with the merman, she discovers he’s a local fisherman named Gustavo and her romantic vision of him as some exotic foreigner is shattered. He is just an average person just like herself. And in quick order, her father is there upon her beach, willing her home.

 

This coming-of-age novel is beautiful in it’s imagery but fails to deliver a complex rationalization for its characters. Luisa skims along the surface of her feelings, never contemplating her present or future in any deep manner. The male characters, aside from her father, are almost puppet-like. The most remarkable part of this entire novel is the father’s mystified reaction to why Luisa left. Not anger, not resentment, not violence. Just a modicum of hurt and disbelief. 

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