An Impossible Love, by Christine Angot, is strange and annoying.

The title is confusing. Which love are we talking about, and what about it is so impossible? The novel starts off telling the love story of the narrator's parents, which is doomed early on. But the impossibility may lie between Christine (the narrator) and her mother Rachel. Or in the difficult relationship with her mostly absent father.

"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."

Classism abounds, with Rachel and later Christine aspiring to the kind of life Pierre represented. Everyone is rather selfish and unworthy. Christine was born out of wedlock; while Rachel's outlook seemed rather modern, Pierre's refusal to officially recognize his daughter felt outdated (though likely in keeping with the French laws of the time). This is a suspected work of autofiction; Angot was born in 1959.

I was surprised to learn that Angot is a Prix Médicis laureate. I'm typically very tolerant of unlikeable narrators and other characters, but in this case it greatly diminished the sympathy Christine deserves, ruining the intended effect of the direction the plot takes. The author is clearly familiar with psychoanalytic techniques, and the narrator as a grown woman has a lot of baggage to unpack. An Impossible Love was unsubtle in reminding this reader, repeatedly and from early on, that this is a book about Christine, not her parents.

"She didn't have the banal feeling of being filled, but of being annihilated, emptied of her personality, reduced to dust."

I really hated Angot’s earlier novel, Incest, finding it overly graphic, but this companion volume gradually drew me in, not least because it was far less sexually explicit, although admittedly equally disturbing. Here Christine Angot, in a very French piece of auto-fiction, chronicles the love affair between her parents before she was born and the obsessive love her mother continues to have for her father, who is a completely worthless piece of garbage, a manipulative and abusive man, who somehow manages to keep his hold on the mother, and, for a while, on his daughter. The complicated bond between the mother and daughter is the strongest part of the novel, while the bond between father and daughter continues to be deeply troubling, but as it is portrayed here with more restraint and with slightly more distance it becomes easier to read about. The devastating impact of the terrible family secret and the effect of childhood trauma on Christine herself is intelligently explored, and the novel is well-paced, only gradually allowing the reader to piece together what has happened. I can’t say I enjoyed the book but it was certainly more palatable than Incest.

It tells the story of the love between Rachel and Pierre in the French town of Chateauroux mid-1950s. Rachel is poor and Jewish and Pierre is quite possibly the most horrible character I have encountered in over 100 novels this year. The way he treats Rachel and the way he treats their daughter Christine has such an impact on their lives that it also threatens to destroy the strong love and bond between mother and daughter.

The first part of the book is an interesting love story, but the second part makes this a very special book even if not particularly pleasant to read. But if you want literature to move I would still very highly recommend.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

This is probably best read in conjunction with Angot's 'L'Inceste' (which I haven't read - yet) as it takes that story partly for granted and is in conversation with the prior book.

There's that indefinable air of French intellectualism about this combined with a raw intensity. Angot takes an unexpected perspective going back to explore the relationship between her mother and father, one that starts off as radiant with desire and love but which gradually shades off into something far more disquieting and disturbing as issues of power, class, race and other forms of asymmetry emerge. With 'Christine', the narrator, as a split consciousness that is both within and part of, as well as external to, the story being recounted, this becomes more sophisticated as its trajectory develops, and emotions and alliances fade and realign.

This is quite short but a book deserving of a re-read.