The book has an intense flavour that can only come from an author’s deep investment in their material ... Aridjis has a way of telling a story that makes us believe. Even the most unusual details feel emotionally true — and that, surely, is the essence of fiction.
There’s something extraordinary about Chloe Aridjis’s writing in The Shadow of the Object, a quality both intoxicating and unsettling. It almost reads like an overly precise and thus mildly unheimlich translation of another’s work ... Between sittings, I kept having that experience of remembering the mood of a dream I must have had only to realise that, no, I was recalling the book. Yearning to get back to the book, more accurately, to submerge myself in its strange logic.
Tender and freewheeling ... Not everything dazzles. An offbeat vignette told from the perspective of a museum-dwelling mouse veers perilously close to twee ... These flaws aside, The Shadow of the Object is a beguiling tale of loss and connection, which rewards readers content to pause and admire the view.
Leaving aside the profundity of its themes, The Shadow of the Object would be an immense achievement based on the strange, impressionistic beauty of its prose alone ... This is a fabulist’s novel, but one in which any gothic excess is tempered by a profound humanity. Nothing so workaday as a plot could be imputed to this glowing, mythopoeic book. But I can only concur with Aridjis’s many admirers that she is one of the boldest writers at work in English today.
