Imminence - by Mariana Dimópulos (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"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

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.