A Wealthy French Family and Generations of Heartache

New York Times

11 hours ago

MISERY OF LOVE, by Yvan Alagbé; translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith
Every death is as singular as a fingerprint. We can see broad patterns in the ways they come about, and affect those of us left behind — the familiar whorls, loops and deltas of race, nationality, family, religion — but each one forms a unique picture of an absence. Or, in the case of the French cartoonist Yvan Alagbé's graphic novel 'Misery of Love,' a series of pictures.
The book has a death as its catalyst: The patriarch and matriarch of the wealthy Genet family have died, and as their granddaughter Claire attends their joint funeral, she remembers having been cast out years earlier by her father, Michel, for the crime of dating Alain, an undocumented Black immigrant.
We read the story from the perspectives of Claire, Michel and Alain, and their recollections fill in narrative gaps for us, but not for one another. With its interlaced, out-of-joint chronologies, 'Misery of Love' is as much about the problem of living with our own choices as it is about the legacies we leave our children and grandchildren.
The characters rarely consist of more than a few brushstrokes and snatches of dialogue (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith), but 'Misery of Love' is both concise and shockingly lush. Alagbé loves images of bodies colliding — in sex, in birth, in violence. Even as Claire takes a solitary walk in the woods, she isn't alone: Her progress is interrupted by visions of Alain there with her, embracing her among the trees. Conversations about sins present and past rarely begin or end, threading through the agonizingly long Catholic funeral.
Alagbé has set himself an impossibly high technical bar and then vaulted over it: Each page is two ink-wash panels, the majority of them without text, but somehow the characters emerge from his shades of gray with astonishing vibrancy. A single page shows Claire and Alain in bed together, opposite a scene in which Claire tells Alain about her childhood home as they walk down the street where she used to live. In the panel below, we see a young Claire standing at the bottom of a flight of stairs.
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