Sea Monsters By Chloe Aridjis with Cascina Fornace Desaja

For the past few years we’ve been on a journey. Not one with a clear beginning or end, but one that tracks our obsessions, moods, atmospheres of mind and season: Reading as if roaming a shoreline, “aimlessly, purposefully, and in search of digressions.” And while this journey has mostly felt mercurial, unspecified—rarely do I know what I am in the mood for until I am consuming it—occasionally, a pattern emerges so clearly that I can not help but follow its thread to the very end. And so it is from the other side of this thread end that I write this, firm in my insistence that this month’s novel, or more so this month’s author, is the only thing that could pull us from our wintry “landscapes of perhapses”and launch us, properly, into the “half troubling, half magnificent” landscape of Spring. To read Sea Monsters is a bit like finding yourself “stuck halfway through a dream.” A dream both “melodious and dis-quieting” where “the truth of things” is both highly subjective and wildly st