An Impossible Love
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An agonizing turbulence lies just beneath the surface of this skillfully wrought novel by the French phenom who caused a sensation with the publication of her novel Incest.
Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is acute. It twists around Pierre's decisive judgments about class, nationalism, and beauty, and winds its way towards dissolution and Christine's own birth. Though it's Pierre whose ideas are most often voiced, it's Rachel who slowly comes into view, her determination and patience forming a radiant, enigmatic disposition. Equal parts subtle and suspenseful, An Impossible Love is an unwavering advance toward a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine's and Rachel's lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator out of this corrosive element, exposing an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The uneven latest from Angot (Incest) slowly unveils the devastating impact of a terrible family secret. The narrator, Christine, tells of the affair her parents had before she was born. Pierre and Rachel want a child, but Pierre doesn't want to marry Rachel. When Rachel informs Pierre she's pregnant, they take a brief trip to the Cote d'Azur, where he borrows money from Rachel before leaving her, telling her that if she "had been rich" he would have considered marrying her. Rachel moves in with her mother to raise her child, and Pierre occasionally writes letters to Christine, but during rare visits he refuses Christine and Rachel's requests that he legally acknowledge he is the father. After Pierre marries a wealthy woman, Rachel breaks off contact with him, and though Christine has always been close with her mother, she becomes unruly and cruel to her after Pierre reappears. Eventually, a family friend reveals a secret Christine has been keeping. Though Angot writes beautifully about the women's intimate relationship, the final pages rush through Rachel and Christine's struggles to come to terms with Pierre's destructive influence, which feels a bit jarring after the slow, drawn-out setup. It's a decidedly mixed bag, but, at its best, this offers an illuminating account of a mother and daughter's complicated love.
