news | Monday April 6, 2020

Impurity has arrived!

A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity – by Larry Tremblay and translated by Sheila Fischman – weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms.

The bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife’s much reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberated on the outside, but constrained and even deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Junior, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, etc.) announced by the television running in the novel’s background gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists – as revealed in Alice’s last book. As narrators of the novel become less and less reliable, good intentions become corrupted, appearances prove to be deceiving, and Impurity’s multiple plots come to a gripping, asphyxiating conclusion.

cover of Impurity

Check out an excerpt from Impurity.

And order your copy of Impurity today!