• An Impossible Love
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Archipelago Books

An Impossible Love

An Impossible Love

by Christine Angot, translated from the French by Armine Kotin Mortimer

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Available as E-Book French Literature
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Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a social ball in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father. Their love is unusually 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 towards a brutal sequence of events that mars both Christine’s and Rachel’s lives. Angot the author carves Angot the narrator from this corrosive element, conveying an unmendable rupture, and at the same time offering a portrait of a striking, ineradicable bond between mother and daughter.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861047
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

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

[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

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

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