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.