Chronicles of An Impossibility – Mia Lecomte, Translated from Italian by Johanna Bishop and Brenda Porster

Description

In Chronicles of an Impossibility, Mia Lecomte charts a haunting cartography of human experience—where memory, desire, and imagination blur the boundaries of what is lived and what is dreamt.

A mother outlives her daughter in “The Birthday,” confronting the injustice of time and the cruel gift of survival. In “Dwelling,” obsession with form and proportion propels a man into a restless, perpetual exile aboard trains that never arrive. “Constructs” follows a failed writer who earns his living by writing only parentheses—until the meaning of authorship itself dissolves. The surreal “New Life” exposes an industry that lets people exchange their identities like homes in a swap, raising unsettling questions of memory, choice, and freedom.

Elsewhere, intimacy collapses into estrangement in “The Guest”; redemption is painfully negotiated in “Salvation”; and in “Animalities,” the human self dissolves into instinct, exposing our fragile borders with the animal world. Each story destabilizes the ordinary, unmasking the impossibilities we carry inside ourselves.

Lecomte’s prose—spare, piercing, and elliptical—leaves readers suspended between recognition and estrangement. Chronicles of an Impossibility is not just a collection of stories but a map of paradoxes, where the familiar is estranged and the impossible becomes inevitable.