Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Mariana Dimópulos, Giramondo Publishing, $24.95.
The opening touches the heart. “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.”
It begins with a new mother returning home from the hospital with her son after an extended illness following childbirth. How this nameless narrator came to have a son, and why she is having trouble touching him, will be unravelled in a braided story that criss-crosses between her life with current partner Ivan, her previous relationship with the intellectual Pedro, and her trysts with a domineering cousin. Then there are the strong influences from two women whom she admires for their rebellious qualities.
Along the way patterns are examined – numerical, relational, personal – and we are confronted by recurring images that hint at unsettling correlations. This mesmerising novella shifts seamlessly between the present and the past.
Imminence is a work of fiction and the subject is a maternity issue. Precisely, it’s about a woman who doesn’t understand love, who tries and fails to love many times, arrives late and reluctantly to motherhood, and grapples with the expectations of her gender. She is uncomfortable as a wife and mother, uncomfortable as an object of desire. It’s a kind of womanhood that doesn’t fit traditional narratives, so the narrative itself subverts traditional expectations with its circularities and repetitions, building a sense of dread.
Assembling a clear picture is disconcerting, at times, but it pieces itself as memories are dispersed across time and place.
Imminence (or Pendiente in the original Spanish) is a smart title because it suggests to readers that something is going to happen whether we like it or not. Alice Whitmore skillfully translates the novel into English, all the while paying close attention to the tinges that pertain to the significances that are entrenched throughout.
