The Imago Stage
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A woman must emerge from the virtual world she’s created to confront her flesh-and-blood past and family.
Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self.
Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Set in the past and not-too-distant future of Montreal, The Imago Stage is an ominous tale of oppression, suppression, and disembodiment.
"A thought-provoking meditation on our relationships with images and digital life." — Kirkus Reviews
"Here is an intoxicating novel, enigmatic and deeply troubling. .. a brilliant book, on our relationships to art, to bodies, and to contemporary technology, which assures us that images do indeed hold the power of seduction." — Dominique Janelle, Le Vif / L'express
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian writer Georges (Under the Stone) crafts a cerebral novel exploring the thin line between the real world and virtual reality. In near-future Montreal, the unnamed agoraphobic narrator, a middle-aged woman, grows obsessed with her personal avatar, Anouk, who shields her from the chaotic world outside. When the narrator's mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the narrator is forced to confront her fears and attempt to leave her apartment accompanied by a group of virtual super friends. Through memories of the narrator's lonely childhood with an alcoholic father and nonresponsive mother in the 1970s and 1980s, Georges paints a portrait of a child who escapes through television and becomes a model at 13. Her reflections on modeling in '80s Paris produce fascinating commentary on the oversized fashion of the period and the narrator's awareness of her desire to remake herself on her own terms ("I was a figure all out of proportion, a humanoid hanger wearing creations of titanic dimensions, with pads that tripled the width of my shoulders"). While the story's arc is slight, hinging on the narrator's tinkering with her illustration of Anouk as she tries to will herself to visit her mother in the hospital, the vivid imagery and intriguing ideas keep it glued together. The result makes for an exhilarating and prescient ride through a woman's lifelong drive toward disembodiment.
