Imagine a darkened theatre and an ordinary stage set with the minimum of furniture needed to reflect the spaces of an apartment: a bed, a table. There is a woman on the bed, a baby beside her. Very soon, a man walks in. Behind them all, not hidden in the wings of the stage but hanging right behind the furniture, is a heavy curtain that cuts the stage in half horizontally, providing only a shallow area of action. As the woman and man interact, as they perform different gestures that involve or ignore the baby, the curtain rustles and moves, parting along various seams to expose other characters and events going on behind the thick fabric.

Only the woman can see what’s happening behind the curtain, and it distracts her. Watching the people back there, she loses track of what she’s doing, or is meant to be doing, in her narrow stage space. Transfixed, curious, she forgets to attend to the baby. This is her baby, but it’s clear she doesn’t feel an intimacy with the child and is even repelled by it. Luckily, the man seems to know what to do. What matters to the woman is understanding what she sees when the curtain shifts.

Mariana Dimópulos’s short novel Imminence is not a play and does not explicitly involve a stage in the way described here. But the interplay between the novel’s main story and its backstory works much like this curtain: it opens and closes suddenly, giving the reader disconnected glimpses into the past that has led Irina, the narrator, to this significant evening. She has just returned from a long postnatal hospital stay to a new apartment with a man named Ivan, whom she seems not to know very well, and with a baby she seems unsure how to approach.

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.

Things move quietly within the spare foreground of this apartment in Buenos Aires, as Ivan and Irina revolve around each other, their movements and dialogue stretching toward each other but not connecting. Irina is focused on what she can see behind that cloth of memory, watching and re-ordering scenes and conversations, remembering, finding patterns and looking for explanations amidst a cacophony of friends and loves and deaths and mistakes.

So this is the structure, but what is the book about? On the basic level of the story, it is about Irina’s previous relationships: with her former lover Pedro, with two friends, Ludmila and Mara, with a grandmother-type figure named Celeste, and a more unsettling liaison with a man known only as The Cousin. These are the characters who have accompanied Irina into this particular night, who live inside her as memories do, as a semi-opaque layering of experience, with the different layers constantly interacting, even blurring and folding over and against each other across a lifetime. These flashing scenes from Irina’s relationships pose questions not only about femininity and feminism, family structures, desire, honesty, intellectual striving and inquiry, but about loneliness, too, and motherhood, and grief.

The book is marketed in terms of Irina’s uncertainty about her new motherhood, and this is certainly part of what Imminence puts forward, but the novel is fuller than that, and that richness is both rewarding and, at times, frustrating. There is so much going on in these pages, and the natural disorderliness of a book investigating memory means that it takes a while for the reader to settle into what exactly is going on, who matters, what events are key. And then, just when all these disparate conversations and scenes are starting to merge into concrete, meaningful questions — What went wrong between Pedro and Irina? What happened to Ludmila? Why didn’t Mara want to share her own new motherhood with Irina? What happened on the long drive Irina and Ivan made in the desert? What is the nature of Irina’s connection to The Cousin? — the climax arrives to both tie up and slightly up-end everything that came before.

In fairness to Dimópulos, a slightly more expansive textual presentation might have helped the reader experience the text in a more leisurely way. Small-format books are often beautiful objects in their own right and Imminence is no exception. The cover is stunning, and the book is lovely to hold in the hand. But it’s a small-font, slender little beauty with about 120 pages of text. The cost of printing aside, there’s an argument to be made for giving this intense story a bit more space to breathe on the page.

Dimópulos’s prose can certainly live up to a larger font. Alice Whitmore’s English translation is a pleasing mixture of lyrical and straightforward, and the novel is filled with startling images accompanying Irina’s descriptions and thoughts:

Logic, in my mind, has always been a woman dressed in white…

There’s a whole world trapped, untouchable, inside those five seconds of a young woman’s laughter. The open mouth is a grand landscape…

The cat had nails like a parrot, and as it fled, they made a sound like chimes.

Ultimately, and regardless of quibbles over printing decisions, what Imminence depicts extremely well is the intrusiveness of previous lived experiences into a present moment. It can be difficult — structurally, textually, poetically — to portray how a conversation “right now” between two people can actually be a conversation between many different people across a lifetime; we are the sum total of our relationships over many years and many encounters. Life interrupts itself, again and again, for better or worse. In that sense, we are all existing on that narrow front stage, trying to be in a present moment but endlessly distracted by that fluttering curtain into our past. Watching Irina fail to negotiate the tension inherent in that dangerous, confusing threshold space is both deeply unsettling and achingly familiar.

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