Aridjis alerts readers to this preference early and often. Sea Monsters begins with Luisa on the beach at Zipolite, contemplating the ancient Greeks, to whom she returns often. She muses that they “created stories out of a simple juxtaposition of natural features … investing rocks and caves with meaning.” Aridjis does this, too. Nature comes alive in her hands. She reserves her fullest imagistic powers for the water: Early in the novel, Luisa watches the surf “write and erase its long ribbon of foam,” and later, in an image I have found impossible to shake from my mind, the waves become “rows of muscular men with interlocking arms that came closer in with each roll.”

Aridjis tends to wear her influences lightly, but she makes an exception for Baudelaire. Before Luisa runs away from home, her French teacher assigns Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. Luisa latches on to “Un voyage à Cythère,” a bleak poem in which Aphrodite’s native island transforms into the deserted site of a hanging. At first, Luisa, wanting an airtight explanation, tries to explain the poem: “The poem’s heart was a carbonized black, and Kythera a somber rocky place where dreams got dashed against its shores.” But her teacher steers her away from that reading: Better, he suggests, to focus on what lies beneath the text. Or as he puts it, better to remember that “events were the mere froth of things, and one’s true interest should be the sea.”

If there is a moment when Aridjis herself appears in Sea Monsters, this is it. From this scene on, she adheres fully to the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s dictum that literature should “evoke little by little an object in order to show a state of soul, or inversely, to choose an object and release from it a state of soul through a series of unravelings … There must always be enigma in poetry, and the goal of literature—there is no other—is to evoke objects.” In Sea Monsters, Aridjis translates this idea effectively from poetry to fiction. As Luisa roams Zipolite, Aridjis invests her full literary powers in sketching the beach around her. She rarely writes about Luisa’s emotions explicitly, but her descriptions slowly guide readers into Luisa’s “state of soul.”

Perhaps the most important descriptions in Sea Monsters are of seashells. When Luisa arrives in Zipolite, she learns that its name might be Zapotec for “‘Lugar de Caracoles,’ place of seashells, an attractive thought since spirals are such neat arrangements of space and time.” Later, she recalls a party in Mexico City with “a large spiral of white powder … [its] whorls so thick it looked like the ghost of an ammonite.” At that party, Luisa achieved a state of happy suspension in time, a state she struggles to summon in Zipolite. As she roams the beach town, hunting for shells and examining crushed toads on the sidewalk, it’s clear that she’s not content. But by only letting Luisa express her unhappiness obliquely, Aridjis evokes dual longings: Maybe Luisa wants time to pass more quickly, or maybe she wishes to no longer care whether time is passing at all.