Publishers WeeklyMarie, the protagonist and narrator of this stunningly good second novel (after Book of Clouds), works as a guard at London's National Gallery—a quiet job for a quiet person who shares a flat with a woman named Jane and spends her evenings creating miniature landscapes in hollowed-out eggshells. The plotting is rail-thin—a co-worker collapses and dies on the job; Marie and Jane visit an eerie cathedral town; Marie travels to Paris with her friend and former colleague, Daniel Harper—but the author creates a strange but palpable narrative momentum. More important, Aridjis casts a powerful light on all kinds of subjects with her digressions: the 1914 attack on one of the gallery's masterpieces (Velàzquez's Rokeby Venus) by suffragette Mary Richardson is connected to the coming "great European disorder" of WWI.
