Imminence
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Playful on the surface, dark and disturbing in its depths."—J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
“Wonderfully atmospheric and evocative, Dimópulos’s latest is exceedingly satisfying.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment. Set over the course of an evening, and a lifetime, Imminence shifts seamlessly between the present and the past. Little by little, her world begins to unravel.
In a dreamlike space composed of overlapping vignettes, Irina retraces the mirrored paths of a life filled with images that swell and recede, recalling the intimacies and anxieties she has shared with her female friends, and with her male lovers: Pedro, Ivan, and the sinister Cousin. Feeling herself caught in a web of obligations, she insists time and again: “I’m not a woman.”
Mariana Dimópulos’s mesmerizing novel reinforces her standing as one of the most expressive and inventive of contemporary Latin American writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 40-something woman living in Buenos Aires and recovering from a nearly fatal postpartum infection struggles to bond with her new baby in this stunning and superbly translated third novel by Argentine writer Dimópulos (All My Goodbyes). As Irina's partner, Ivan, cares for their baby, she ruminates on past and present lovers, as well as best friends Mara and Ludmila, to whom coupledom once seemed "like polar ice, or the black floor of the ocean," back when they were 20. The three women pledged never to marry or have children, but their plans changed after Ludmila's untimely death, the circumstances of which gradually emerge. Irina's narration moves fluidly and associatively through time. When a stranger remarks on Irina's weakness after coming home from the hospital, Mara's response, after a paragraph break, is, "Nonsense," but that's actually a two-year-old memory, when Mara insisted Irina could learn to apply makeup. After Ivan declares their baby's name is Isaac, Irina remembers one of her first lovers, who had the same name. In addition to her memories of past lovers and friends, a lover she calls "the Cousin" steadily reappears in Irina's life over the intervening decades, and her feelings about him and others gradually offer clues for her ambivalence about being a woman and a mother. Spectacular prose suffuses the novel—a smile is "like a feeble gift"—along with provocatively caustic interior monologue ("let's invent something completely unoriginal, like men and women do," the narrator imagines saying to one of her former lovers). Wonderfully atmospheric and evocative, Dimópulos's latest is exceedingly satisfying.
