First Impressions
I always find it fascinating when a book creates such a wide divide between professional critics being largely positive and everyday readers who tend to be far more judgemental, and that's exactly the case with "The Shadow of the Object". Most readers I've come across seem either mixed on it or genuinely baffled, generally agreeing that the first half draws you in while the second half drifts. I found myself feeling similarly at first: a bit baffled by the randomness and whimsy of the story, and torn between enjoying that disorientation and feeling frustrated by it. The more I sat with the book and dug into what it might actually be doing, though, the more compelling it became, even as I can completely understand why plenty of readers won't want to put in that extra work to find meaning in it.
Flora, Wilhelmina, and a Magic Lantern
The novel follows Flora, a woman originally from Mexico who hasn't been back in a long time, returning to visit her mother and stepfather. Early on she's bitten by the family dog and ends up hospitalised with a badly injured hand. There she meets Wilhelmina, an older woman with a fixation on magic lanterns and other antiquated devices for projecting light and image, objects that summon the past. I was genuinely charmed by this opening section and by Wilhelmina herself, a wonderfully odd, vividly drawn character who puts on a magic lantern show in the hospital and belongs to a small, almost cult-like circle devoted to these obsolete forms of projection. Their wandering conversations reminded me a little of Kazuo Ishiguro's short story "Nocturne," which follows two people recovering from plastic surgery drifting through hospital corridors together, and more broadly of the tradition of novels set inside institutions like Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain."
Once Flora returns to London, though, the novel drifts into stranger, more meandering territory: a chapter from the perspective of a mouse, a girl lost in an art museum, scattered lists of objects and fragments from the past. It becomes a novel less about plot than about how a distant, essentially unknowable past keeps projecting itself into the present, shaping how we understand ourselves and each other, or at least that's my best reading of what it's reaching for. Flora meets Wilhelmina's son, Max, back in London, and their relationship drifts along in much the same way, oddly bound together without ever feeling especially close, which left me wondering, quite literally, where the story was even going. It doesn't offer clear answers, though the final page struck me as a possible key to the whole thing, a point of quiet progression in Flora's life, even if I can see how that payoff arrives too late for a lot of readers to feel satisfied by it.
Where Critics and Readers Diverge
What's striking is that the very qualities critics tend to praise, its plotlessness, its refusal to resolve into a clear, defined journey, are often exactly what readers find most frustrating. I felt both reactions myself, especially once the novel left the hospital and the immediate charm of Flora and Wilhelmina's dynamic behind.
Digging Into the Title
Once I started pulling on the title itself, the novel opened up considerably. One review I came across compared it to Leonora Carrington's "The Hearing Trumpet," and interestingly, Aridjis has described having actually known Carrington personally; she comes from a deeply literary family, having met Jorge Luis Borges at one point, and clearly grew up steeped in this kind of experimental, edgy writing. A member of my own book club, Andrea, also pointed me toward a psychoanalytic reading of the title, which comes directly from a line in Freud's 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia": "Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object." As I understand it — and I'm no analyst — the idea is that incomplete mourning works by absorption rather than release. Instead of gradually letting the dead person go, we take them in, and the self is quietly remodelled in their image. Every grievance we could never voice to them then curdles inward, because the nearest available version of them is now us.
There's a second possible source too: a 1987 book by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas that shares this exact title, "The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known." Bollas takes Freud's phrase somewhere slightly different, toward the idea that we carry a kind of sensory awareness of parts of our own past that we've never consciously known or remembered, things that remain just out of reach yet still cast a shadow over the present. That felt like an even closer fit for this novel, with its recurring imagery of projection, walls, light and shadow, and the sense that what's left of the past is never the thing itself, just its flickering projection, closer to atmosphere and mood than to any retrievable memory. That might explain why the novel offers so few hard specifics, whether about its own plot or about Flora's inner life and motivations. She's returned to Mexico having lost her biological father; Wilhelmina becomes something like a substitute parental figure for her; and then, since Wilhelmina's own son Max has lost his mother, Flora in turn seems to become a substitute for Wilhelmina in his life. There's a real current of mourning and substitution running underneath the novel's surface, though I should say Aridjis hasn't confirmed any of this psychoanalytic framing as intentional, so some of this may simply be my own slant on the text. Still, the title feels too pointed to ignore.
There's also real significance, I think, in Flora's profession: she polishes silver, quite literally removing the tarnish, the shadow, from metal objects to make them clear again, even as she can't seem to manage the same clarity with the actual people in her life. She returns to Mexico City after a long estrangement and promptly attaches herself to Wilhelmina, which raises the question of whether Wilhelmina is the lost object here, or simply the screen Flora is projecting her own losses onto. I don't think the novel wants to answer that for the reader.
Then there's the dog that bites Flora at the very start, named Diogenes, or Diego as a Mexican nickname. Diogenes of Sinope was the founding figure of Cynicism, a philosopher famously described as fawning on those who gave to him, barking at those who refused, and biting the rascals, which is how he earned the nickname "the dog" in the first place. Read that way, the bite that opens the novel isn't just a physical injury; it's practically a philosophical gesture, stripping away whatever illusions Flora has built around her own life. It's a nice added layer that one of Diogenes's most famous acts was wandering Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lamp, supposedly searching for an honest human being, illuminating what was already perfectly visible, which chimes neatly with the novel's whole preoccupation with light, projection and what we choose, or fail, to see clearly.
Verdict
Digging into these layers made the novel considerably more interesting to me, though that's a different thing from it being a wholly satisfying reading experience purely as a story. This is one of those books where you largely get out of it what you're willing to put into it, and I can fully understand why it won't work for everyone. For me, it landed somewhere between cautious appreciation and positivity: I mostly enjoyed the experience, quirks and all, even while spending a fair amount of time scratching my head. I'd love to hear what you made of it, whether it worked for you, frustrated you, or landed somewhere in between, and whether there are meanings in it I haven't even touched on here.
