An Impossible Love by Christine Angot (Book Review)

 

An Impossible Love 

By Christine Angot
Translated by Armine Mortimer
Published by Archipelago Books, 2021
Price: $18

Rachel is 26 and Pierre is 30 when they meet in latter half of the 1950s in France. She works for the Securite Sociale and he is a translator at an American army base. He comes from money and she does not. In fact, you could even say she lives in squalor with her mom. But you know what they say, opposites attract. They begin spending a lot of time together and they fall in love. Rachel is head over heels in love with Pierre and wants to be with him always. Pierre, on the other hand, isn't quite looking for a conventional relationship. 

Pierre wants his freedom. He enjoys his time with Rachel but does not want to be around her 24/7. He wants to see other women. He wants to focus on his job. In effect, he only wants Rachel around when it is convenient to him. Marriage is out of the question but paradoxically, he would like to have a child with Rachel. It does not really make a lot of sense. But Rachel goes along with whatever scraps of love Pierre will give her. They do have a daughter together, who coincidentally is named Christine, just like the author of the book. But Pierre begins to be around less and less after Christine's birth and leaves her upbringing to Rachel. What a swell guy. 

Christine, the author of book, is also the narrator of An Impossible Love, which is where this book enters into some weird meta territory. Obviously, the author was not a witness to her parents courtship and cannot know what their dialogue was like. I went into this thinking this book was a novel but realized as soon as the daughter's name was mentioned it was going to be one of those hybrid novel autobiography memoirs mish mashes. It makes you question what is fact and fiction. What has been sensationalized or made up in the service of the art? To be honest, I did not really care. I just looked at it as writing. 

The book jacket mentions events twisting against social order and human decency and "enacting a form of violence with consequences that echo through multiple generations". There was not any of that in the first 2/3s of the book, but since it was on the jacket, I knew something horrible was going to happen at some point in the work so I was waiting for the other shoe to drop as I was reading. When it finally does come, I cannot say I was surprised since this author also wrote a book called Incest and constantly brings up how she was molested by her dad. It seems to be an event or theme that runs through a lot of her work. But the danger of constantly using and revisiting that trauma is that it can become self exploitive or that Angot might fall into the trap of writing the same book over and over again. 

It's hard to say what my experience is when I think of words to describe it. The book jacket sets you up for a jump scare so you are always waiting for some event to happen on the next page. It was sad. It was tragic, but what is the truth? Are the motivations of Rachel and Pierre true or just what their daughter made up in her head? 

Was it a bad book? No. Was it good enough to keep and not donate to my goodwill or public libary? No. Don't really have interest in reading another book by Angot. Feel like it will just be another book about incest. 

My Grade: C