Review of Incest by Christine Angot

​Incest by Christine Angot is a novel about a woman who had an incestuous relationship with her father as a teenager and is in the throes of breaking up with another woman. The speaker, Christine, is married to Claude and has a daughter, Léonore, though has an affair with another woman, Marie-Christine. Christine then recounts the encounters and trips with Marie-Christine, while also describing the rockiness of their relationship. It leads into Christmas where Marie-Christine is supposed to go to Rome with Christine, but they decide to not go the first day. They eventually do go, but it displays the fervor and intense emotions of them, paradoxically, wanting to be together and be separate. Near the latter half of the novel, Christine begins to hint and describe her encounters with her father when she was a teenager. They hadn’t known each other until she was fourteen, where her father has another life with another family. There are encounters at a theater, on her vacation, at a church, in her father’s car, and on walks. The character sees herself as feeling both debased and also an intense desire to continue the relationship with her father.
 
Angot provides a deeply personal look into the narrator’s head, in which it reads more like a stream-of-consciousness account rather than one that is thoroughly recounted. However, I think it works to show the character’s frazzled and disorganized nature. It’s also interesting how the character continually brings up the fact that she had a relationship with a woman, but she is not gay. It’s brought up in mantras, in the repeated phone calls, and in the way plans are created then cancelled and then replanned. The novel’s subject matter and discussion provides insight into taboo things, though not only is Christine, the character, is aware of this fact, but decides to defy it. I also found it interesting in how the lines blur between the author, Christine Angot, and the character, Christine Angot. Both are writers, though not necessarily autobiographical, it provides a mystery to the reader as to what is truly fact and what is fiction.
 
Final Rating: 4/5