Interview With Booker-longlisted Author Chloe Aridjis

I've always been very interested in how charged certain objects are. They can be not only magic lanterns and more obviously fascinating objects, but even the most mundane can have a significance or a very strong history. I've always been interested in that historical charge of objects and almost of sort of psychodynamic carriers of something. So, in this novel it's particularly the magic lantern, but it could have been something much more mundane but with a long history. And the title, even though it comes from Freud, is very much about the long shadows cast by objects and how individuals can live within the shadow of an object and how it can mean something different to every person.

I love the title so much. Christopher Bollas, the psychoanalyst, used this title for a work of psychoanalysis in 1987; nothing to do with my book, but I just love seeing it on the spine. So, I've had that book for many years on my shelf and I've intentionally never read it because it was just such a trigger for the imagination that I always knew I wanted to have that title for a book. And then I just knew it had to be for this novel that's all about optical illusion.

In earlier drafts, I had fewer conversations and these are not the first thing I tend to write. And of course, the conversations with Wilhelmina set up the rest of the book. Those are extremely important. Her character comes alive through the conversations and so they linger and they sort of circle Flora's mind in the rest of the book. After the section in Mexico with Wilhelmina, I felt like the rest of the conversations just punctuate the narrative at very particular places and sort of throw things into relief or highlight something that needs a bit more highlighting at that moment and then move back to a more dreamlike state.

Gesticulation reveals something of the character's nature that doesn't come through in speech and also in this novel because there's an element of shadow play and more theatrical characters, especially Wilhelmina. I think of her as quite a theatrical character. So, her gestures in particular are very important.

Speaking from personal experience, objects that were passed down from relatives, from grandparents or someone else very important in your life who's no longer there, are very much carriers of a history but also a personal narrative and triggers or conduits, towards reverie and contemplation. I have in my desk in London little objects and figurines from different moments in my life. Each one represents something completely different. Just staring at one of them, sometimes I get an idea for a story or an image in a book. And so they're very much conduits, too.

I think that started with my first novel that was set in Berlin, Book of Clouds. I lived there for nearly six years, and it's impossible to forget the past when you're in Berlin. I was constantly aware of the past and how easy it is to stumble upon traces of it. And again, the feeling that the present—if you only open yourself a little to being more receptive to traces of the past—it comes flooding in, and the feeling that no present and no scene can ever be cleansed of the past.

It's a very dynamic concept for a novelist. I thought of the narrators, both Max and Flora, and Wilhelmina to a certain extent, being haunted by these disappearances and also musing a lot about what is illusion. There are the illusions that we see on the stage; the magic show, or the magic lantern show, but then the other sort of illusion, the ones that we don't really choose, but that help us accept the difficult moments in life or disappearances or absences. The illusions that we create for ourselves so that we can continue living.

And so with these disappearances, there's a sense of—to counter these disappearances—a search for enchantment or conjuring presences out of those absences. I wanted to play with the idea of bringing the mechanisms of a magic lantern show or shadow play into the more human and psychological realm.

Always. I suppose in another life I would have loved to have been a painter. In London I put on a magic lantern show every winter, with images that I haven't created myself. My favourite writing exercise is creating a narrative out of an image that either comes to mind or that's in front of me. Often, I have commissions where I write a short story responding to a painting. Almost every novel starts with one scene or one very strong image and then it spirals out from there.

Illusions can be a way of finding the truth in a way that reality doesn't permit us to because we have so many defenses in our daily lives. Through illusion, you relax those defenses and see something that might be hidden by all the mechanisms that are unconscious or our mind is constantly working, trying to protect us from certain truths. With illusion, you sort of drop your guard. And that's what magic lanternists and magicians have always said; that this is where the truth lies.

Actually, the novel is bookended by real experiences in my life. The dog bite, I did live through that, and the boat scene at the end. The dog bite happened 11 years ago when I was visiting my parents here. I only had to spend one night in the hospital and then I had to go everyday for checkups. And I did have three surgeries. It was such an intense and traumatic experience that I took many notes at the time. I did go back to the hospital to take more notes and photos once I started writing the book. It's strange because that hospital, the ABC, is across the street from my school here in Mexico City. So, it brought back many memories.

(Mohammad Farhan is a writer and an academic)