In 1949, Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote an essay in which he claimed the ‘marvellous real’ as the ‘heritage’ of all Latin America. Dismissing the European Surrealists as fakers – ‘dream technicians turned bureaucrats’ – he declared that, for Latin writers, the marvellous required no artificially induced dream state. Their homelands were flush with miracles: vast, virgin landscapes; unlikely cultural fusions; widespread practice of the indigenous witchcraft known as brujería. The novelist Chloe Aridjis, who was born in the United States but mostly raised in Mexico, the country André Breton thought of as the ‘Surrealist place par excellence’, is a beneficiary of this heritage. She has described a 1980s childhood filled with Latin artists: weekends meant reading Juan Rulfo, going to Manuel Alvarez Bravo exhibitions and having family friend Luis Buñuel to tea.

Her enchanting new novel, The Shadow of the Object, begins in Mexico City. The narrator, Flora, who is visiting her childhood home, is being rushed to hospital in a taxi after having been bitten by the family dog. ‘At night he turns wolf,’ her mother has said. Animals roam the Chapultepec landscape outside, which is otherwise deserted. We later hear of the Museum of Anthropology, which is ‘bristling with skulls and snakes and jaguars’, and of markets selling peces diablo, the skeletons of catfish that ‘transform into something demonic in their wizened incarnation’. This is the same territory explored by the British writer and artist Leonora Carrington, who spent much of her adult life in Mexico City, in a world governed jointly by humans and animals – or, as Aridjis once put it in a documentary about Carrington, ‘an enchanted world, something beyond our everyday reality’. 

Flora’s sickbed becomes a site of introspection: ‘Who was I? Self-portraits must often be drawn in hospital beds.’ While in hospital, she befriends Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman whose pneumonia symptoms pain her less than the nurses’ refusal to sneak her a cigarette. Wilhelmina, a wonderfully observed character who likes