A Wealthy French Family and Generations of Heartache

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.

I read “Misery of Love” three times and found a completely different book on each reading. “What I’m interested in is work that renders visible what has previously been invisible,” Alagbé told The New York Times in 2018. For the artist, the son of a white French mother and a Black Beninese father, this means a persistent focus on the legacy of French colonialism; and here he explores it with such subtlety that his themes, too, can seem at first opaque and then perfectly clear.

I’m not even sure this book’s nested, disjointed timelines can resolve at all unless you’ve read the whole thing through at least twice, and are able to connect what happens in the end back to the beginning. A scene in which Michel appears to photograph Claire and Alain lying naked in bed appears horrifying at first; but on subsequent readings it becomes clearer that Alagbé is showing us why Michel hates Alain; why he hates Malika, a sex worker he’s also in love with; and why he hates himself.

Through these little stings of revelation, Alagbé slowly offers glimpses of Claire’s secrets: Her family ran a brothel; her father is a vicious racist; her father was in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife. The Genets are a supremely dysfunctional, vindictive family, and the book is written with such an intimate understanding of their faults that there is an almost disorienting pleasure in watching Alagbé expose the resentments and traumas that make them tick.

Claire will be familiar to readers of Alagbé’s previous book, “Yellow Negroes,” a collection of now-classic comics completed between 1994 and 2011, and translated into English in 2018, also by Nicholson-Smith. She appeared as a minor character in that book, but here she dominates the story as she slowly comes to terms with the loss of Alain and the complexity of her father’s hate.

“Misery of Love” is a sad, unusual, astounding story, built so solidly that its intricacies are invisible one minute and unavoidable the next. This is, Alagbé suggests, precisely how human beings experience love, and its absence: not chronologically, but constantly. Claire is haunted by memories of Alain everywhere she goes; his embrace and his loss are never not happening to her. And in that sense love truly is as miserable as the title suggests; it is an open wound that can never heal. Perhaps we wouldn’t want it to.

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