Imago by Francesca Rendle-Short

Imago Reviews

• 
  Lisa

  I bought Imago last year at the Melbourne Writers Festival because the blurb intrigued me so much. I had never heard of the psychoanalytical use of the term ‘imago’ but it sounded interesting.
  
  
  imago 1. the final and fully developed stage of an insect after all metamorphoses e.g. a butterfly or beetle.
  2. Psychoanal. an idealised concept of a loved one formed in childhood and retained uncorrected in adult life….
  Imago is a story of love and obsession, of seduction and transformations. The threading together of skins, of bodies. It’s a story of metamorphosis, taking and eating, larvae and pupae, the risks of stagnation. Possibilities of death.
  
  That sounds like a lot to pack into a debut novel, but the juxtaposition of metamorphosis and stagnation offers interesting possibilities for fiction. I had enjoyed Brian Castro’s The Bath Fugues which played with the triple meaning of fugue (a psychiatric state, a musical term and C19th wanderers.) (See my review). I thought Imago would be fascinating, and it was.
  
  Molly Rose is an English girl who marries her idea of a husband only to find him remote, impotent and socially inept. When she migrates from England, she leaves behind a mother who smothers her, only to form an obsessive friendship with her neighbour who is a cross between a mother-substitute and a lesbian lover. Marj’s husband Kevin works away from home a lot, as does Molly’s husband Jimmy, leaving the women to spend a great deal of time with each other allowing their relationship to morph into something else.
  
  It’s a sensual book. There is a lot about fat and flesh, fabrics and flowers. Marj cooks and shares robust meals and delicate baked specialties. Canberra is resolutely suburban, baking in the summer heat, and Molly revels in shedding the restrictive clothing of her past.
  
  To read the rest of my review please visit
  http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/03/06/im...