Adele

Product Information

Toutes ces aventures sont placées sous le signe de la satire amère, de la frustration angoissante, de la jouissance triste, de la froide indifférence, du mépris, de l'incompréhension, de la tricherie, de l'ennui, de la résignation, et de comment malgré tout on survit à tout ça, en cherchant quelque chose qui nous fasse vibrer et empêche notre cœur de geler, dans une vie et une ville glaciale. Adèle is addicted to sex: she seeks out both affairs and casual encounters, often seducing the most unsuitable and dangerous people (a colleague of her husband's; her best friend's on-off boyfriend) as if that adds to the thrill. If you think you can handle the subject matter then you will be rewarded with a fascinating character study of a disturbed mind.

She and her husband annoyed the hell out of me, but I take it as a result of Slimani's good writing of human phycology and characterisation. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms trauma into survival. Then, inconveniently, her best friend falls for husband number one - estranged Elvis impersonator - and they all head for a showdown in Las Vegas.

This is a book of how a singer or a song can connect so many people and touch so many hearts in a way no one else could. It’s well-written – it’s like a slightly more literary version of the porn-y novels that are so popular with many women – and it is morbidly interesting, if you see her behaviour as a reaction to the myriad existential issues we all deal with daily, albeit more extreme. I was ‘surprised’ - really surprised - that a potentially intriguing topic could possibly be so down right dull and boring!

Slimani follows up with an exploration of sexual addiction and another character that feels compelled to detach herself from reality. With this book she has managed to build a morose, tension-filled masterpiece filled with nuances that add incredible depth to an already deep subject. That tale of a murderous nanny, exposing the fetid emotional growths fouling the bourgeois home, was Slimani’s second novelistic investigation of forbidden desires.

o tema é pesado, mas está muito bem retratada a dificuldade de algumas pessoas se entregarem a um conformismo da vida e terem uma necessidade constante de procurar novos elementos de pulsão e desejo constante … não é um livro para todas as pessoas e não é uma leitura fácil… contudo, Leila fez um excelente trabalho nesta sua pequena obra. Slimani claims she wrote this novel after being inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, wanting, she said, to look at the phenomenon of sex addiction through a female perspective. Once ‘the Devil ran through’ her family, Maddie free falls from institution to institution, growing into her queerness and discovering her fate—that ‘God has to be music. But it's still a relevant one, and some might say more authentic when written from the perspective of a female author. But unresolved emotions and unhealed wounds, as well as long-buried memories can also have hazardous and unpredictable consequences.

As in The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani dives way below the surface to expose the nakedness, the self that controls our desires, obsessions, and motivations. Privileged psycho she-beast in a shitty marriage sleeps with half of Paris but the sex is weird and boring and then her husband finds out and then the marriage becomes even shittier, but they stay together anyway and so what? In Lullaby, the question driving the book is not only whether the mother Myriam will find a way to survive bourgeois life without feeding off the weakness of another woman, but whether the nanny will give in to her own weakness, abdicating responsibility for keeping her charges alive. Like Flaubert, though, she empathises with her character, even at her silliest (Adèle falls asleep with her face in an ashtray), and occasionally we feel something like Flaubert’s interest in the nuances of Adèle’s mind.Mas tem uma história fortíssima, claustrofóbica, triste, que nos esmurra e nos faz querer amparar esta mulher que nunca chegou a ser. We are given glimpses of her background/family and yet that story, which seems much more interesting than the central plot, is never properly dragged into the light.