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Imminence
Winner, NSW Premier’s Translation Prize
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.
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
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
