An Impossible Love
by: Christine Angot /Armine Kotin Mortimer (Translator)

Softcover. NY, Archipelago Books, 1st Transl., 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wrappers, 215 pages. 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.