Adele

The author was able to put me inside Adele's head to experience the inexorable drive of her addiction which ultimately resulted in frustration and degradation.Some reviews criticise the repetition but such is the nature of the beast.This was a book that was a compulsive read.The ending came as no surprise but was realistically inevitable.Brilliant.

Female sexuality is an interesting beast; in literature and the arts, very often there will either be the femme fatale presented, or the girl-next-door. But, this is really doing a disservice to women. Female sexuality is much more complex and nuanced than that. Having just finished Adele, I am left wondering what Slimani is trying to say about it, and what she hoped to bring to the subject of female sexuality."Adele" features a lead female protagonist, Adele, who is married to a successful man, with a young boy. Although from the outside it looks as though she would have everything that she wanted, she has an insatiable desire for sex. She thinks nothing of putting everything on the line in order to meet these needs. "Her only ambition is to be wanted." (p. 52) For her, being wanted means, often, cheap meetings in seedy hotels, just to get the thrill that she is seeking.Personally, this burning desire in Adele just didn't really translate into a very relatable, or likeable character. And, other than you reading about the various different men that she has encounters with, nothing else really happens. I just don't see how this novel has given anything really positive to the idea of female sexuality. Slimani paints Adele in such a bad light that there is hardly anything which redeems her. Even the way that she sees being a mother, as a constraint and an obstacle in what she would really like to be doing, just sets her apart from a lot of other women who would be mothers, but also sexual beings:"Lucien is a burden, a constraint that she struggles to get used to... Adele had a child for the same reason that she got married: to belong to the world and to protect herself from other people. As a wife and mother, she is haloed with a respectability that no one can take away from her. She has built herself a refuge for her nights of anguish and a comfortable retreat for her days of debauchery." (p. 26)There is nothing to aspire to here, nothing of female empowerment, as it is falling into the stereotype that a woman has to either be a good mother, or that she can be sexy, in control of her own fate, but she cannot be both. I think, for this reason, amongst others, I found this novel to be really quite depressing.Despite Adele seeming to believe that she is in control of her life, and her body, there are moments when she is portrayed as being a submissive/passive female, who is dependent on male appreciation in order to feel good about herself:"Men rescued her from her childhood. They dragged her from the mud of adolescence and she traded childish passivity for the lasciviousness of a geisha." (p. 122)No matter how Slimani tries to portray Adele, I do not see her as a woman who is enjoying, and in control of her sexuality. In fact, there are times when she seems to decline in mental health due to it. Her self-worth is tied up with how men respond to her, even if she doesn't find them sexually attractive. Whilst it shouldn't matter how many partners a woman has, I feel that Slimani has made Adele fall into a disagreeable category, by how she has created her character for this tale. As Adele herself observes, "The men are going to think that she's up for it, easy, a slut. The women will treat her as a predator; the kinder ones might say that she's emotionally fragile." (p. 19) I would have enjoyed this novel more if there had been more complexity and nuance to Adele's character; something that draws her up from the levels of depravity that she describes to us.

Ashamedly , I was initially drawn to this book due to the subject matter - a sex addicted woman- but as I continued to read the story,I became more and more repulsed and equally depressed. My lasciviousness soon quickly gave way to sorrow. I had hoped to gain some useful insight into the workings of a female mind in regards to sex. However , the protagonist Adele’s journey was ,too dark , too grim , too unsettling. I struggled to find an ounce of sympathy for her ,instead in the end ,all of my sympathy was directed at her dutiful husband Richard and her son Lucien.Overall ,this book is well written ,short but very engaging. Despite a busy week , I managed to complete it in just two sittings. It’s a book that I would highly recommend for reasons far more to do with discovering the effects of female promiscuity on marriage and motherhood than for just the mere prurience connected to the subject matter.

Having read Lullaby by the same author I was eager to read her new book. It was an easy read, it only took me 3 evenings. It is an interesting story of a woman who is not who she appears because she has a secret life. I liked the descriptions of Paris where she lives. There was a beginning a middle and an end. But overall I preferred Lullaby.

Following Lullaby, which I loved , I had high hopes for this book.Some of it is fairly interesting, for example her blatent promiscuity; however other than that there is no real thread holding the story together. There is no plot, no insight into why she sleeps around and no decent ending.It was a holiday read and very forgettable.

those looking for a biography of the singer Adele should look elsewhere

I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this book but then it slowly fizzled out. I think because Richard was not a very sympathetic character — too weak. Adele, a French woman with an Algerian father and a French mother, was an interesting character though and I wish her childhood had been explored further.

A book to really read