Publishers Weekly
08/03/2020
Canadian writer Georges (Under the Stone) crafts a cerebral novel exploring the thin line between the real world and virtual reality. In near-future Montreal, the unnamed agoraphobic narrator, a middle-aged woman, grows obsessed with her personal avatar, Anouk, who shields her from the chaotic world outside. When the narrator’s mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, the narrator is forced to confront her fears and attempt to leave her apartment accompanied by a group of virtual super friends. Through memories of the narrator’s lonely childhood with an alcoholic father and nonresponsive mother in the 1970s and 1980s, Georges paints a portrait of a child who escapes through television and becomes a model at 13. Her reflections on modeling in ’80s Paris produce fascinating commentary on the oversized fashion of the period and the narrator’s awareness of her desire to remake herself on her own terms (“I was a figure all out of proportion, a humanoid hanger wearing creations of titanic dimensions, with pads that tripled the width of my shoulders”). While the story’s arc is slight, hinging on the narrator’s tinkering with her illustration of Anouk as she tries to will herself to visit her mother in the hospital, the vivid imagery and intriguing ideas keep it glued together. The result makes for an exhilarating and prescient ride through a woman’s lifelong drive toward disembodiment. (July)
From the Publisher
"A thought-provoking meditation on our relationships with images and digital life." –Kirkus Reviews
"The Imago Stage is flat, intensely orchestrated, and nearly lifeless: essentially and purposefully so." –World Literature Today
"Here is an intoxicating novel, enigmatic and deeply troubling... a brilliant book, on our relationships to art, to bodies, and to contemporary technology, which assures us that images do indeed hold the power of seduction." –Dominique Janelle, Le Vif / L'express
"Karoline Georges doesn’t align herself with the vast community of techno-pessimists. Without slipping into utopianism, she sees technology’s exponential growth with clarity and curiosity... Virtual reality and artificial intelligence are words that do not scare her... With Karoline Georges, we go beyond obsession, beyond a will to please, or to seduce. We aim instead for pure disembodiment, we’re virtually in the realm of mysticism." –Chantal Guy, La Presse
"A lucid and provocative novel. Karoline Georges brilliantly breaks open our fascination for screens, for emoticon conversations, for beauty without imperfections, for eternal life." –Josée Boileau, Journal de Montréal
“In this singular story dedicated to the mother, the narrator creates an avatar to counter her distress. Karoline Georges succeeds in combining the real and the virtual around the complexity of family ties. The author approaches solitude and the representation of the body with astonishing lucidity. The Imago Stage transcends genres in intelligent and effective prose.” –Governor General's Literary Award Peer Review Committee
"Karoline Georges suggests that reality can be lived, forming a lasting image instead of the preserved, yet temporary image of the virtual." –Full Stop Magazine
"The only thing you have to sacrifice to achieve this blissful utopia is your humanity." –Quill & Quire
"This is truly an amazing book that can be enjoyed by anyone." –The Girly Book Club
"One of the greatest strengths of Georges’ novel is that she does not shy away from the narrator’s persistent discomfort and uneasiness in the resolution, and this is a profound insight to the process of resolving trauma." –Winnipeg Free Press
"Canadian writer Georges (Under the Stone) crafts a cerebral novel exploring the thin line between the real world and virtual reality. . . The result makes for an exhilarating and prescient ride through a woman’s lifelong drive toward disembodiment." –Publishers Weekly
"The Imago Stage is an unusual tale of healing and rebirth, in which the protagonist, Anouk, escapes from her traumatic childhood memory by immersing herself in images." –Asymtote
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-29
A woman lives through virtual reality.
The narrator of this provocative novel lives partially in a studio apartment in Montreal and partially in a virtual world of her own creation. Entranced by her avatar, Anouk, a digital creation she can edit at will, she spurns the outside world until her mother becomes gravely ill and is hospitalized. Suddenly, she is wrenched from the cloistered, digital life she has built for herself and faced with the reality of mortality. The novel alternates between the narrator's present-day struggles and stories about her childhood growing up in Montreal and young adulthood working as a model in Paris in the 1980s. From a young age, she was fixated on images and became obsessed with turning into an image herself. Instead of forming connections with other people, she began to live almost entirely through the digital world of avatars and virtual reality. Georges, who is an accomplished digital artist as well as a writer, clearly understands the power of the image, skillfully critiquing society’s fixation on the female body as an object through her protagonist’s fixation on images—she takes thousands of self-portraits while working as a model—and her inability to exist comfortably in her body. Only the digital world offers her true satisfaction. Georges’ novel is intellectually rigorous and provocative, and she evokes the 1980s vividly. Her characters are thin, however, and her prose can be overwrought: Sentences like “Our galaxies moving resolutely away from each other with the grace of a celestial ballet” are common. Ultimately, this slim volume is more satisfying as an intellectual exercise than as a work of drama.
A thought-provoking meditation on our relationships with images and digital life.
