An Impossible Love

by Christine Angot, Armine Kotin Mortimer (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953861054
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	12/21/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	800 KB

About the Author

CHRISTINE ANGOT is one of the most controversial authors writing today in France. Since the 1999 publication of Incest, Angot has remained at the center of public debate and has continued to push the boundaries of what society allows an author to express. Born in 1958 in Châteauroux, Angot studied law at the University of Reims and began writing at the age of 25. Her literary works have received prizes including the Prix France Culture in 2005 (for Les Désaxés and Une partie du cœur), the Prix Flore in 2006 (for Rendez-vous) and the Prix Sade in 2012 (for Une semaine de vacances), which she refused on the grounds that the theme of the prize did not correspond to the book she had written. In 2015 she won the Prix Décembre for her novel Un Amour impossible. Angot is now also a commentator on the television show On n'est pas couché.

ARMINE KOTIN MORTIMER is the translator of Philippe Sollers's Mysterious Mozart (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and his Casanova the Irresistible (Illinois, 2016), as well as Julia Kristeva's The Enchanted Clock (Columbia University Press, 2017). Her long career as a professor of French literature occasioned many scholarly books and articles, as well as recognition by the French government with the Palmes Académiques in 2009.

Read an Excerpt

My father and mother met in Châteauroux near the Avenue
de la Gare in the cafeteria she frequented, at twenty-six she had
already been with the Sécurité Sociale for several years. She
started working at seventeen as a secretary in a garage; he, after
lengthy studies, had his first job at thirty. He was a translator at
the American base in La Martinerie. Between Châteauroux and
Levroux, the Americans had built a housing development on
several hectares with little one-story houses surrounded by gardens
without fences, in which the families of the military lived.
The base had been allocated to the Americans through the Marshall
Plan, at the beginning of the fifties. A few trees had been
planted, but when you went by on the highway, you could see a
multitude of red hip roofs scattered across a broad empty plain.
Inside what was really a little village, wide paved streets allowed
the inhabitants to travel in their cars, slowly, between the houses
and the school, the offices, and the runway at the base. He had
been hired there after his military service, he didn’t intend to
stay. It was temporary. His father, who was a director at Michelin,
wanted to persuade him to work for the Green Guide, but he
readily saw himself having a career as a researcher in linguistics
or in academics. His family had lived in Paris for generations, in
the seventeenth arrondissement, near Parc Monceau; they came
from Normandy. In Paris, many had been doctors. They were
curious about the world, they had a passion for oysters.
He invited her for coffee. And a few days afterwards for a dance.
That evening she was supposed to go to a so-called “social ball”
with a girlfriend. Social balls, organized by a group or an association
that rented an orchestra and a large hall (distinct from the
dance halls frequented by Americans and prostitutes), attracted
the young people in Châteauroux. This one took place in a large
exposition hall on the Déols highway, Hidien Park. My father
didn’t usually attend.
“Oh, I don’t go to that kind of thing … We’ll go out another
evening. I’m going to stay home. I have work …”
She went with her friend Nicole and Nicole’s cousin. The evening
had already gone on for quite a long time when she saw him
in the distance coming through the crowd. He approached their
table. He invited her to dance, she got up, she was wearing a
white skirt with a wide belt. They made their way toward the
dance floor, he smiled as they arrived on the parquet floor, she
was ready to slip into his arms, he took her hand to guide her and
spin her around among the dancers. At that moment the orchestra
began playing the first measures of “Our story is a story of
love.”
It was a song you heard everywhere. Dalida had inaugurated
it. She would sing it with intensity, mixing the tragic with the
banal. Her accent gave a roundness to the words and stretched
them out at the same time, her deep voice enveloped the sounds
and gave them a particular substance, there was something
haunting about the whole thing. Accompanied by the orchestra,
the singer imitated Dalida’s original interpretation, the better to
heighten the emotion.
Ourr storrry is a storrry of lo-o-ove
Eterrrnalll and banalll it brrrings each day
All the good all the bad.
They weren’t talking to each other.
It’s the well-known storrry …
The dance floor was crowded, it was a very popular song.
Those who lo-o-ove each other play together, I know
My complaaaint is the plaaaint of two hearts
It’s a novel like so many others, which could be yourrrs
It’s the flame that enflames without burning
It’s the dreeeam you dreeeam without sleeping
My storrry, it’s a storrry … of … a … lo-o-ove.
They were silent during the whole song.
With the hourrr when you embrace, the one when you say
farrrewell
With the evenings of anguish and the marrrvelous mornings …
And tragic or very deep, it’s the only storrry in the worrrld
That will never end.
It’s the storrry of a love …
They weren’t looking at each other.
But naïve or very deep, it’s the only storrry in the worrrld,
Our story is the storrry … of a lo-o-ove.
The song came to an end, they separated. And they went back to
their table through the crowd. She introduced Nicole and her
cousin to him.

Editorial Reviews

"The most recently translated autofiction by controversial French literary phenomenon Angot brings her unflinching intelligence to a terrible childhood trauma . . . Described without overstatement or sensationalism, raw and honest, [Rachel and Christine's] experience rings brutally true . . . Disturbing, powerful, a deeply personal story that is also searingly political."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An illuminating account of a mother and daughter's complicated love."
–- Publishers Weekly

"Christine Angot is one of the bravest women writing in France today, and Armine Kotin Mortimer’s English translation of this novel is lucid and powerful. Incest was among the most difficult books I’ve ever read. Shockingly raw, erratic, poetic, and chaotic, it put you in the center of the author’s self-loathing. But the restraint and emotional range displayed in An Impossible Love makes this book a more painful story."
—Amanda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of Books

"An Impossible Love immerses the reader in both the solipsism of the two lovers and the wider world of French society in the 1950s . . . Angot has suggested that there is no distinction between real and fake, nor true and false in literary writing. There is only ‘alive prose’ and ‘dead prose’. There are words that remain on the page, and those that somehow manage to transcend themselves. Angot’s writing lives."
—Alice Blackhurst, New Left Review

"I was enthralled by An Impossible Love from the first page to the last.  Christine Angot brilliantly traces the minute fluctuations of emotion in her trio of characters, as well as the evasions, omissions and deceptions implicit in every kind of love.  A daring and impressive performance."
—Lynne Sharon Schwartz

"A compelling chimera . . . A dissection of how power can be a potent aphrodisiac to those who wield it, a poison to those on its receiving end . . . Angot’s method is cunning and confrontational, delivering a shocking sucker punch to any of us that might be tiring of autofiction."
—Heavy Feather Review

"[An Impossible Love] has a formal, dispassionate style of language. Towards the end, this yields to an emotional depth when mother and daughter . . . reach a point of clarity and concord about the person who ruined their lives."
—Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times

Praise for Incest

"A formally daring and passionate performance of the depths of human self-loathing, and the sufferings of attachment. It cut deep inside me with its truths. In every moment of reading it, I both wanted to keep reading it and wanted to write. I don't think I will ever forget this book." — Sheila Heti  

"A maximalist in the art of emotion, Angot unmasks with frightening precision the roiling heart and the sharp edges of lust, loathing, and scorn lodged within love's fossil record. This is a book that points you toward the subterranean roots of your own emotions, the intricacies and murk we cover up in the name of normal daily operations." — Alexandra Kleeman

"At times reminiscent of playwright Sarah Kane, particularly in her incantatory free associations . . . Incest is remarkably prescient. Christine Angot pinpoints how technology antagonizes mental health; how a lack of immediate reply can give the obsessive mind no room to breath." — Rebecca Watson, The Times Literary Supplement

"A sensation in France, [Incest is a] novel in the form of a wild confession of a life filled with trauma." — The New York Times

"Given Angot's antagonism toward conventional syntax, the English translation, by Tess Lewis, is a feat of perspicuity... When "L'Inceste" was first published, an interviewer asked Angot what she hoped to achieve. "My ambition is to be unmanageable," she said. "That people swallow me and at the same time cannot digest me." — H. C. Wilentz, The New Yorker

"Angot's writing reclaims the confession as a radical act—spiritual, even... At its core, Incest is a true testament to the subversive power of literature, in that it transmutes the violation of incest into connection with the reader." — Elizabeth Baird, The Millions

"Christine Angot, who despises proper sentiment, has a fascinating, exhilarating, dazzling sensitivity." — Yann Moix, Le Figaro littéraire

From the Publisher

★ 2021-09-29
The most recently translated autofiction by controversial French literary phenomenon Angot brings her unflinching intelligence to a terrible childhood trauma.

The novel starts with the love story of the narrator's parents. It's the 1950s in the small French town of Châteauroux when beautiful, impoverished Rachel meets Pierre, the cultured scion of a wealthy Parisian family. Rachel lives with her younger sister and works at the Social Security office. Pierre is a translator at the nearby American military base. Rachel's parents are not much present, her mother due to ill health, her father because, being Jewish, he spent the war out of the country; he appears only to criticize and reject his offspring. Rachel's love for Pierre is unanalyzed, naïve. He seems extraordinary and unconventional, unlike her small-town suitors. When he explains that he will never marry her, because he needs to feel free and because her family isn't wealthy, she understands, even though "When you went out with a man, and you weren't married, you know, in those years, you were like a piece of trash." Likewise when she gets pregnant and he refuses to come see her, choosing instead to vacation in Italy. She raises their daughter, Christine, on her own while working full time during a period when most mothers stayed home. She calls the girl "my little fawn," and Christine adores her. Then Pierre reappears, now married to a rich German with whom he has started a family. Rachel implores him to recognize Christine officially. They're moving to Reims for her new job, and no one there knows her history. At last, complaining, he agrees, and Christine takes his name, Angot. He begins to visit, taking her to restaurants and away on weekend trips, encouraging her studies. Starved for paternal affection, adolescent Christine is entranced by her father's style and money, his education. A chasm opens between her and her mother. And a terrible secret divides them. The slow, painful healing of their rift is deeply moving. (When, a grown woman and mother herself, Christine begins to call her mother Mamanagain, it's "like a little bell at last repaired.") Described without overstatement or sensationalism, raw and honest, their experience rings brutally true. What began as a love story ends as an indictment of generations of internalized misogyny, antisemitism, class warfare, and the abuse of power.

Disturbing, powerful, a deeply personal story that is also searingly political.

Kirkus Reviews