Reading with... Chloe Aridjis

photo: Nick Tucker

Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican-American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in 19th-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London. Her novel Sea Monsters was just published by Catapult.

On your nightstand now:

I'm judging the Rathbones Folio Prize so every few days it's a different book. But purely for pleasure, I am slowly making my way through Simon Schama's Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900, a glorious and often tragic evocation of the Jews' search for a home.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. It's like a childhood enactment of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, a kind of phenomenology of night.

Your top five authors:

Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, Jorge Luis Borges. Well, it's between Gogol and Chekhov.

Book you've faked reading:

Possibly parts of the Bible.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. It came out in 1975 and, alas, remains just as urgent on almost every level. My dream would be for everyone to read it, leading to a global revolution in the way humans treat animals, ending their exploitation forever.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Joscelyn Godwin's Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World--I was very excited to finally see a large volume in English devoted to this extraordinary man.

Book you hid from your parents:

Once long ago I bought a cultural history of the devil. I began to feel superstitious so I put it at the back of my bedroom closet in Mexico. To my knowledge, it is still there.

Book that changed your life:

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Other Stories, and in particular the story "Tonio Kröger." I still have the paperback edition my parents gave me when I was around 14.

Favorite line from a book:

It would be impossible to choose only one but, if I may, I've always loved this line from one of my father's poems: "The music of the night is not in the stars but in the darkness between them."

Five books you'll never part with:

Kafka's Complete Stories, Chekhov's stories, Borges's Obras Completas, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

There are many but the first that comes to mind is Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England. An absolute enchantment of a book, whose political message is brilliantly sublimated into truly memorable scenes. I also loved Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude.

A short story you often return to:

J.G. Ballard's "The Drowned Giant."

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