Chloe Aridjis on why fantasy is so important in her writing

Chloe Aridjis, a Mexican-British novelist, discusses the significance of fantasy in her writing. Her debut novel, *The Book of Clouds*, set in Berlin, won the Prix de France for Best Foreign First Novel. Her other works include *The Divergent Ones* and *Sea Monsters*, which won the 2020 Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction. Aridjis has also written for various arts magazines and co-founded the Writers Rebel movement, focusing on climate and biodiversity issues.

Her latest novel, *The Shadow of the Thing*, was longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. The story opens with Flora being attacked by her family dog in Mexico City, turning this physical wound into a gateway to themes of memory, imagination, and reflection. Aridjis chose this opening scene because she had a vivid memory of a dog bite she experienced a decade earlier, which she felt would make a fitting starting point for the narrative, symbolizing disorientation and change.

The hospital in the novel serves as a transitional space where time slows down, allowing characters to introspect and connect with one another. Aridjis is drawn to such spaces, evoking the atmosphere found in works like Mann's *The Magic Mountain* and Bernhard's *Wittgenstein's Nephew*, where everyday life is suspended, and characters find themselves on an equal footing.

Objects in *The Shadow of the Thing* are not mere possessions but bear the traces of their past owners and continue to narrate their stories posthumously. Aridjis believes objects carry a history and a psychological depth, functioning as "carriers of a history, of a psychodynamics, as dramas in themselves." For instance, the magic lantern in the novel represents different things to each character—Wilhelmina associates it with a lost world of collecting, Max sees it as an unwelcome intrusion, and Flora views it as a projection of her fantasies.

Aridjis sees objects and images as "the story rather than any spoken language," highlighting their role in memory as "images that appear, disappear, and return through time," drawing parallels to Sigmund Freud's theories on the mind's spatiality and the repressed.