Armine Kotin Mortimer joins us to present her translation of Christine Angot's subtle and suspenseful novel "An Impossible Love" — out now from our friends at Archipelago Books — in conversation with Martha Cooley. This virtual event took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): [ Ссылка ]
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.
About the author:
Christine Angot is one of the most controversial authors writing today in France. Since the 1999 publication of "Incest," Angot has remained at the center of public debate and has continued to push the boundaries of what society allows an author to express. Born in 1958 in Châteauroux, Angot studied law at the University of Reims and began writing at the age of 25. Her literary works have received prizes including the Prix France Culture in 2005 (for "Les Désaxés" and "Une partie du cœur"), the Prix Flore in 2006 (for "Rendez-vous") and the Prix Sade in 2012 (for "Une semaine de vacances"), which she refused on the grounds that the theme of the prize did not correspond to the book she had written. In 2015 she won the Prix Décembre for her novel "Un Amour impossible." Angot is now also a commentator on the television show "On n’est pas couché."
Armine Kotin Mortimer is the translator of Philippe Sollers’s "Mysterious Mozart" (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and his "Casanova the Irresistible" (Illinois, 2016), as well as Julia Kristeva’s "The Enchanted Clock" (Columbia University Press, 2017). Excerpts from her translations of Sollers’s novels have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, AGNI, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cossack Review, and Asymptote. Her long career as a professor of French literature occasioned many scholarly books and articles, as well as recognition by the French government with the Palmes Académiques in 2009.
Martha Cooley is the author of the national bestseller "The Archivist," "ThirtyThree Swoons," and "Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss." "The Archivist" was a New York Times Notable Book and a New and Noteworthy paperback. Cooley is currently a contributing editor at A Public Space. Her cotranslations of Italian fiction and poetry include Antonio Tabucchi’s story collection "Time Ages in a Hurry." A professor of English at Adelphi University, Cooley divides her time between Queens, New York, and Castiglione del Terziere, Italy.
