Adele

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If you think you can handle the subject matter then you will be rewarded with a fascinating character study of a disturbed mind.

Here there’s the question of whether Adèle will allow her addiction to take over her life, destroying her love for her son. In stark contrast, Nadia emerges as a beacon of unwavering determination, striving for independence in a male-dominated environment. Slimani offers up scant details – she didn’t have the best childhood, though it wasn’t so bad and plenty of people don’t become sex addicts as a result of a shitty parent.Tahar Ben Jelloun, reviewing it for one of the French papers, pointed out that most Moroccan novelists produce a first book about the maghrebain experience, whereas this is a purely French novel. The extreme sex she craves and willingly submits to, the violence she longs to have her body subjected to…. I also liked reading about Adele’s backstory and how it wasn’t the really stereotypical kind of portrayal of a emotionally shallow female sex addict. I imagine some readers will be disappointed with the ending but for me it was nothing short of sublime, genius storytelling, leaving me raw with emotion. With no end in sight from her increasingly out-of-control behaviour, how long can she keep her private life from being exposed?

At first I felt kind of bad for Adele’s husband Richard, but after a while it became increasingly difficult to feel bad for his situation either. It appears that the authors invested considerable effort in weaving Adele's songs into the tapestry of their characters' lives but overlooked other crucial elements of storytelling. The book's narrative style and language present a rollercoaster ride, oscillating between poetic, stiff, hollow, and ordinary.

Adele doesn’t care about anything except fucking, which is the only act that she doesn’t consider boring and pointless. Slimani choses not to give a neat and coherent explanation for Adèle's decisions, she is not excused or even portrayed as particularly likeable. Bertei depicts her relationship with her brilliant mother, who was schizophrenic, with uncommon empathy and grace. 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.

Dora is initially hesitant to commit to this final job, but she thinks she can trust her client Daniel. The books are so similar in tone that I'd have no trouble believing they were written by the same person).Underground legend Adele Bertei’s roman a clef is like something out of the darkest pages of Charles Dickens. This is a story about a young Parisian woman married to her surgeon husband with whom she has a young son. Before I was eleven, I'd lived in Cyprus, Nigeria, and North Borneo and later my parents were also sent to the Gambia and Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Despite Adèle’s obvious suffering and loneliness, I found it almost impossible to empathise with her, as Slimani depicts her protagonist as an utterly unlikeable woman, not because of her sexual debauchery but by underlining what an egotistical, bored and overindulged creature she is as a privileged petite bourgeoise ‘having it all’ – the distance to the character sharpened by Slimani’s detached and chilly style. For several years, she’s combined a sexless marriage to Richard with a closet life as a sex addict, seducing almost all the men she meets.