10 Stars! The best literary stunner I've read this year. Deeply textured and intricately layered, this literary gem is destined to become a classic studied by high school and college students everywhere.

Marie works as a guard for the National Gallery in England. Her great grandfather was also a guard at the same museum. His story of his inability to stop an angry suffragette from vandalizing a painting haunted him forever.

Marie spends most of her life content to be an observer except for the tiny landscape creations she makes and places on a high shelf in her bedroom. Her best friend, Daniel, is a struggling poet bent on perfection. Their friendship walks a tightrope between tenderness and despair.

The entire story is a meditation on the inevitable surrender of decay, from the classic artwork in the museum subject to craquelure to Marie's roommate who spends thousands of dollars on cosmetics promised to trap youth and prevent aging.

Written with startlingly fresh images and deep insights, Asunder will leave you torn open.


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This one's a gem, and I'm genuinely surprised that so few LibraryThing members have it in their collections. "Asunder" is one of those novels that takes us deep inside a world most people probably don't give a lot of thought to: the world of museum guards. The book's main character, Marie, is a actually the second museum guard in her family line and, after ten years pacing quiet hallways and near-empty galleries, is more than used to her duties at the National Gallery. Marie is a patient, unobtrusive type, and knows it. She's in a working-class profession, but hardly ignorant about art or inured to the beauty that she spends her working life around. Indeed, some of this novel's most productive relationships take place not between its characters but between Marie and the paintings she spends her days guarding. The author has certainly done her research, and the insight she gives her readers into a profession that's characterized by silence, danger, beauty and boredom in more or less equal measure is often fascinating.

"Asunder", predictably enough, turns on whether the book's principal events of its plot will Marie to stick with her secure, highly predictable employment or move out into the wider world. This is, also perhaps predictably, a novel in which minor plot events cause ripples in its characters' lives that feel more like waves: not so very much happens, but Aridjis's measured precise prose ensures that readers will understand the full emotional import of every seemingly unimportant event. For all the dead time and empty space she describes in "Asunder," her writing is hardly the sort of functional, personality-free "white writing" we've come to expect from writers who specialize in sterile modern settings. While her subjects aren't necessarily extraordinary, Aridjis's prose can take some unexpectedly fantastic turns: at one point Marie imagines the faces of the art restoration students she's watching crack and flake like the paintings they're examining. There are places, where the analogies that the author draws might seem a touch too literary or on-the-nose, but other, deeper themes in this book are explored with a subtlety and a light touch that is nothing sort of masterful. I was pleasantly surprised at how real Marie felt to me after just under two hundred pages. Recommended to art lovers, fans of good prose, and to those who love a good underdog story. ( )

This is the slim paperback novel I bought at Waterstones in London to read on the train trip to Edinburgh, and it was very appropriate. The main character is a security guard at the British National Gallery, which we had just visited. She is an introverted young woman with artistic interests and a quasi-boyfriend with whom she visits Paris to house-sit for several weeks. Her grandfather was a retired guard at the gallery who often tells her the story of a suffragette who managed to slash a painting (as a protest) before he could stop her. I was surprised to learn (through Google) that this was a real historical act for which someone called Mary Richardson was arrested. It was a well-written book with great descriptions of modern life in London and Paris but not a very clear plot. ( )

Asunder is a short book, but it demands a lot of its reader. Its main character, Marie, is a guard at the National Gallery in London where she has worked for nine years becoming intimately acquainted with the museum's many works of art and sinking into a life of days marked by routine and lack of ambition. There is little plot to speak of, just Marie's slow dawning realization that she's allowed her life to become like one of the paintings she guards: ripe for contemplation but requiring her to maintain a safe distance. Marie's life within Aridjis' pages is austere, marked by long days at the museum, evenings crafting delicate dioramas from egg shells, and a bizarre friendship with fellow museum-guard and poet, Daniel, a relationship that demands the following of a certain set of rules to "thrive," and a relationship that each fails to push beyond the realm of awkward friendship despite numerous opportunities.

I struggled with very mixed feelings about Asunder. On one hand, Aridjis's writing is compelling. She can turn a phrase, and the way she describes the strung together episodes of Marie's life draws out the mundane life she leads as well as a few surreal, bizarre occurrences that finally set up Marie's life for a change. On the other hand, Asunder is a very short book that took me so long to read because I ended up pausing numerous times to stare into the middle distance trying to piece together what seemed to be a collection of unrelated events into some sort of cohesively themed whole. I always felt like I was on the verge of understanding the larger scheme of what Aridjis was trying to say but never quite getting there. In the end, without a little more help understanding the nature of Marie's transformation, Asunder failed to make the jump from a compelling piece of artful writing to an engaging story, and I was left with the distinct impression that I was missing something, rather than the closure I was looking for in Asunder. ( )