Imminence

by Mariana Dimópulos, Alice Whitmore (Translator)

Overview

"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 mesmerising novel reinforces her standing as one of the most expressive and inventive of contemporary Latin American writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945492556
Publisher:	Transit Books
Publication date:	09/07/2021
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mariana Dimópulos was born in Buenos Aires in 1973. She studied literature at the University of Buenos Aires and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. She is the author of three novels, including All My Goodbyes and Imminence, as well as short stories and non-fiction, including a critical study on the work of Walter Benjamin. She is a translator from German and English into Spanish, and teaches at the University of Buenos Aires.

Alice Whitmore iis a writer and literary translator living on Gunditjmara country. Her translations from Spanish to English include Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyesand Imminence, Guillermo Fadanelli’s See You at Breakfast?, and Xhevdet Bajraj’s Collected Poems. She is the translations editor at Cordite Poetry Review and an associate editor at Giramondo.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/26/2021

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. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"In her elegant short novel, Mariana Dimópulos explores the compromises a human being makes in taking on the identity and social role of a woman. With its caustic vignettes of male vanity and its subtle self-mockery, Imminence is playful on the surface, dark and disturbing in its depths."—J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"[In] this unsettling novella, which unfolds during a single tense evening in Buenos Aires... Irina’s sense of alienation—from family, friends, lovers, and the social expectations of womanhood—suffuses her stream-of-consciousness narration."—The New Yorker

Praise for All My Goodbyes

"A marvelously interior novel, unique in its perceptions, that traffics both in the joy of invention and the sorrow of memory."—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"A fascinating kaleidoscope of regret."—Publishers Weekly

"Remarkable . . . The destabilizing sequence of events illuminates Dimópulos’s commitment to portraying a new global citizenship characterized by interruption, dispersal, and disruption.”—BOMB

“Scientific in its distance and philosophical in its insight, All My Goodbyes is a marvelous, introspective work.”—Iowa Gazette

"[A] splintered novella about murders that haunt a girl in Patagonia. Dimópulos constructs time as fluid, making the narrative structure of the book fragmented."—World Literature Today

"Mariana Dimópulos's wonderfully strange and addictive All My Goodbyes is narrated by a woman driven to abandon everything the moment it becomes familiar. The scattered pieces of her story—each of them wonderfully distinct, laced with insight, violence, and sensuality—cohere into a profound evocation of restlessness, of the sublime and imprisoning act of letting go."—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena

"How to describe the clear and mysterious force of Mariana Dimópulos’s writing: the brief intensity; the compassionate irony; the grand themes viewed through the lens of a microscope; the recognition and exceeding of past traditions. Above all, it is a writing gestated in unknown lands."—Esther Cross

From the Publisher