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Imminence
We’re alone together, for the first time. I have to touch him now. I try stroking a foot, then a shoulder. But no current lifts in me, nothing pulls at my chest the way they said it would.
A new mother holds her month-old son for the first time, but her body betrays her with an absence of feeling. Taking place over the course of an evening, and a lifetime, Imminence shifts seamlessly between the present and the past. Disoriented, she wanders with her partner around their plant-filled Buenos Aires apartment. 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 novella reinforces her standing as one of the most expressive and inventive of contemporary Latin American writers.
Mariana Dimópulos’s writing, with its delightfully strange perspectives, its selfishness, its iciness and its passion, its power and its vulnerability, seems somehow to condense the poetry of mathematics; Imminence posits an elegant formula for the experience of contemporary womanhood.El País
On All My Goodbyes:
Her language is at once stark and poetic…there is a strict economy of words that brims with withheld emotion, and it is this constant tension between want and remove that makes this work haunting.The Lifted Brow
A marvellously interior novel, unique in its perceptions, that traffics both in the joy of invention and the sorrow of memory.Kirkus (starred review)
