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.
