The Impostor
Two exquisite novellas on memory, perception, and shifting intimacies
In "The Impostor," a man travels with his wife through Italy and recalls a family legend about an uncle who was swallowed by Mt. Vesuvius. Preoccupied by this mysterious event, he grapples with the fallibility of memory and the enigma of time. In "Blue Butterflies of the Amazon," a matriarch, rendered mute and paralyzed by a stroke, defenselessly observes the shifting dynamics between her only son, his wife, and her husband while they play out their complex intimacies before her.
As the characters of The Impostor wander between worlds and states of mind, Edgard Telles Ribeiro elucidates their situations in surprisingly inventive ways that explore devastating questions of reality, consciousness, and loss.
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Advance Praise for The Impostor
"These inventive novellas are like literary puzzles for the reader to tease out." --Kirkus Reviews
"Telles Ribeiro's title novella is a tour de force that takes place simultaneously in the distant past and in the present, in a seamlessly fractured continuum of time. The second novella is a complex and breathtaking work, rich in feeling, an audacious, dazzling performance. By turns delicate and humorous, wrenching and melancholic, it lays bare the souls of its characters in a manner that I can only call Chekhovian. It is the work of a master." --Jaime Manrique, author of Cervantes Street and Like This Afternoon Forever
"Comical and brooding, enchanting and disturbing, The Impostor triggers a unique free fall into the unnerving craters of the mind." --Laura Restrepo, author of Delirium and The Divine Boys
Select Praise for Edgard Telles Ribeiro
"Elegant, absorbingly knowing, chilling, dryly humorous and often moving." --Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name and Monkey Boy
"Cunning" --Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post
"[Telles Ribeiro] unveils details with a poetic lushness, unhurried, dreamy, as if lingering on their weight, their significance." --Philadelphia Inquirer
"The art of Telles Ribeiro's [work] is in his sumptuous lyrical narrative style." --Tulsa World
"Telles Ribeiro's [work] is of global import, a caution against too readily forgetting and too quickly adapting." --Words Without Borders
"Telles Ribeiro, a diplomat by profession, is a natural writer. His language is impeccable and imbued with a grace that's impossible to resist." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
