There were some rather unconventional selections one could choose in the automat cafeteria: layer cake of snow, leg of lamb in a large sock, bath brush with sauce. While the fire alarm rang, and the sprinklers poured water over us, we sat down at our table, each with our dish. You had a trumpet with a cold, I a small dolmen. "I hate surrealism," you said, and I explained why it has nothing to do with surrealism. "Also, look at how beautiful it is when the heavy drops of water hit the table top," I tried. Exactly at that moment, the trumpet sneezed. A sneeze so suppressed, embarrassed, it seemed almost human.
"Aridjis’s work does not rely on the irony and metafiction so prevalent in contemporary Latin American literature. His humor is not playfully self-referential but dark, linked with the social, political, and visual excesses of the cultural tradition from which it emerges. Although he engages with many themes from the present, there is a timelessness to his work, a plenitude that often displays an element of the baroque."
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"My home mountain range, the Colorado Sangre de Cristo, is an 80-mile fault-block uplift, with ten summits over 14,000 feet....Walking there for the last forty years has helped me learn that place is neither fixed nor purely spatial, but temporary and temporal, contingent and unstable, an intersection of forces I happen to encounter (and take part in) during my brief time on earth and briefer time as walker through a landscape. Here & now is a knot, and all its strands are moving."
