In Misery of Love a spiritual seuquel to the acclaimed Yellow Negroes and other Imaginary Creatures, Yavan Alabé continues his unflinching interrogation of race and family in modern France. Colonial history haunts this stunning spectral-looking graphic novel, a spiritual sequel to the author’s Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures.

Alabé focuses on the dream-like memories of a woman named Clare, blonde, slight, willful- faces her estranged father as her family comes together to bury her grandparents   One of earlier stories suggests there was a double suicide.  Alagbé seamlessly glides between narratives of the family’s past and present, all haunted by the legacy of France’s colonial subjugation of Africa. Alabé uses comics, as he put it as “a sacred dimension which celebrates, questions and perpetuates life.. I believe that life is not damnation but grace”. Glimpses of Clare’s brooding ruminations reveal the bitter history behind the hostile reunion. Though Clare’s interracial marriage to Alain (an Immigrant artist : Sans- papiers”) emerges as a focal point of friction, corrosion set in long before. The family fortune, such as it is, traces back to a brothel Claire’s grandparents operated in an immigrant quarter -the setting for a series of searing childhood memories. In Alain, Claire finds an escape from inheritances both pecuniary and psychic, and Algbé depicts their lovemaking in sensuous, frank detail – yet the legacy of colonialist exploitation skulks ever nearer. Revelations remain tauntingly ambiguous, uncertainties are left suspended in midair.  Algabé shrouds his murky ink wash art in purposeful obscurity, with spectral human forms blurring into near-abstract compositions, like Gerhard Richter Photo-paintings by way of Hugo Pratt. In haunted ellipses Alagbé conjures an almost tactile sense of disquiet that isn’t easily shaken. It’s a stunning graphic novel counterpart to the obsessive fever dreams of Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis.

Told through time shifts that echo Richard McGuire’s Here Misery of Love is another ambitious devastating masterpiece from one of France’s best contemporary graphic novelist.

Misery of Love by the French Virtuoso cartoonist Yvan Alagbé Translated by Nicholson-Smith. Penguin Random House $29.99, 232 pages.