Asunder by Chloe Aridjis

There was an abundance of loud people in the world and someone had to compensate, bring the dial down halfway. We preferred to stand back, cross our arms and observe. The world was full of people rushing around, trying to change things or make themselves seen. So it fell to the rest of us to withdraw from the foreground, just like those distant bluish landscapes in old paintings, so discreet you only notice them later. I liked to imagine our kind as thinkers in training, a flow of indefinite blue that deepens over time.

Asunder, Chloe Aridjis

Marie works as a museum guard at National Gallery in London. She appears to be happy there, it offers the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation, surrounded by a world of beauty and heritage. But after nine years Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. It’s not just the passivity of her profession, in a way it seems that the mythological figures in the artworks, often nudes, begin to affect her psychology. She becomes fascinated by a painting in particular, The Rokeby Venus, a provocative and mysterious picture of a female nude by Diego Velázquez but also by the Suffragettes, and in particular Mary Richardson, who famously slashed the Rokeby Venus to protest the imprisonment of a fellow Suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst.

Marie, like the Suffragettes, feels trapped and repressed, unable to express her feelings and desires directly, especially towards her fellow guard and poet Daniel. Like the woman in the Rokeby Venus, Marie, feels like a woman that people look at her from behind. Even when someone try to look very closely at her face, even then, her face is blurry and ambiguous, almost invisible, just like the face of the woman in Velázquez’s painting.

Asunder is a haunting, captivating and strange story, but as Daniel says somewhere in the book  ‘Life’s not complete without some kind of haunting’.