RaveThe MillionsIt can take patience to stick with Angot through this structurally perverse expression of suffering. Early on, she describes calling Marie-Christine 200 times in the span of a few days ‘to see if she loves me to exhaustion, as she claims.’ At times, the reader feels similarly tested when trying to make sense of the repeating images and narrative chaos. But submitting to the logic (or illogic) of Angot’s world ultimately gives the thrilling sense of having melded with another consciousness, since it requires an almost complete abandonment of your own—in another nod to incest, this book often feels like its own referent … At its core, Incest is a true testament to the subversive power of literature, in that it transmutes the violation of incest into connection with the reader.
