The Imago Stage
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Growing up with a menacing drunk for a father and a grief-stricken mother, a girl spends her 1980s childhood staring at the television to escape the tension, depression, and looming violence that fill her suburban home. After winning a modelling competition, she dedicates herself to becoming a placid image onto which anything can be projected, a blank slate with a blank stare. Earning enough in Paris to retire in her twenties, she buys a studio in Montreal and retreats from the world and its perceived threats, cultivating her existence as an image through her virtual reality avatar. But when her mother develops cancer and nears the end of her life, she is forced to leave her cocoon – surrounded by her posse of augmented reality superheroes – and interact with the world and her parents without the mask of her perfect, virtual self.
Georges offers up an alienated childhood with shifting pop culture obsessions, a woman’s awakening to the role of the image in culture, and her eventual isolation in her apartment and the world online. It is a catalogue of the anxieties of an age, from nuclear war to terrorism, climate change to biological warfare. Karoline currently lives in Montreal.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Rhonda
Mullins
Rhonda Mullins has translated many books from French into English, including Grégoire Courtois’s The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Novels she has translated have been contenders for CBC Canada Reads, and Suzanne was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.
Rhonda Mullins has translated many books from French into English, including Grégoire Courtois’s The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. She is a seven-time finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation, winning the award for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals. Novels she has translated have been contenders for CBC Canada Reads, and Suzanne was a finalist for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. Mullins was the inaugural literary translator in residence at Concordia University in 2018. She is a mentor to emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
The Imago Stage by Karoline Georges brilliantly explores the issues of body image, obsession with beauty and self-staging on social networks alongside with complex family relationships. Well written and thought-provoking, the author takes a disturbing look at our fascination for screens to escape our flesh and bones reality. Bibliothèque de Québec, Canada