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Adele

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An entertaining, insightful journey on the relationship rollercoaster in this exhilarating collection of short stories. Is this a portrait of a pitiful, lonely and sick woman or rather one of an ailing capitalist society where both work and family life are deeply unsatisfying and alienating? It seems to give her life meaning, at least for a short time, before she tumbles back into a self-loathing-fuelled resolve to stop this dangerous series of betrayals. Following Adèle on her downward spiral into the enslavement of her need for sex with strangers is not unlike that of any other addiction, I could have easily been reading a book about a heroin addict. They don’t want to be outcasts so they marry, have children, work at respectable careers---YET, this doesn’t mean they are able to quash their secret SELF.

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. However, when you finish Adèle you end up feeling how a story about a sex addict could end up being so vanilla? However, his fixation on black magic and his unrealistic blame on Malika's mother for their breakup make his character appear delusional, rendering his storyline somewhat vague. This is a story about a young Parisian woman married to her surgeon husband with whom she has a young son. Some of the time Àdele is doing and saying what we all wish we could, some of the time she shocks and disgusts you, and some of the time she is numb.

Sabe escrever como ninguém sobre o corpo da mulher e neste livro agarra-nos numa vertiginosa viagem à vida dupla de Adèle, da sua adição sexual e da sua incompletude e busca pelo absoluto e pelo que para si poderá ser o amor. These and other details suggest that Dans le jardin de l'ogre may have more autobiographical resonance than is first apparent. The world’s hardest cynic bumps into the last of the great romantics but their pasts dictate their futures can never be simple.

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. Along the way we encounter an unforgettable schizophrenic mother, Catholic saints, West Side Story and Oliver! In the end, "My Trip to Adele" remains a book with untapped potential, leaving readers yearning for a more fulfilling literary journey. Both books are very good at showing that there can be a kind of gleeful pleasure in overcoming your fears by living them out, losing the things you are most desperate to hold on to. But Adèle is an altogether more obdurate character than Lullaby’s harassed mother or thwarted nanny, resisting interpretation and repelling empathy at every turn.Like a substance addict she has to score her next shot of fornication to feel alive, to exist: ‘Somewhere in her oblivion is the reassuring feeling that she has existed countless times in the desire of others’.

All Adele ever feels is a crushing sense of emptiness and ennui, and the only thing that temporarily takes this feeling away is sex- lots and lots of loveless, skeevy, and sometimes downright rough and painful sex with a litany of random guys. Later, having received numerous reactions and personal testimonies of Moroccan women responding to her novel (which resulted in a non-fiction book, Sexe et mensonges (Sex and Lies) she explained in an interview she now considers ‘Adèle as a slightly extreme metaphor for the sexual lives of many Moroccan women, who struggle to reconcile the reality of their private lives with the public narrative of a society in which everyone is supposedly married or a virgin’ and she denounces the Moroccan society to be ‘consumed by the poison of hypocrisy and by an institutionalized culture of lies,’ arguing ‘that repression is as corrosive to society as it is to the psyche.

But as the guests assemble, it becomes terrifyingly apparent that putting her past behind her is impossible. This book is written in an amazing, fast pace, and you will never notice how you have scrolled through the pages and hours have passed. As the book progresses, we see how a typical day unfolds from Dora’s perspective and this was quite the eye opener. Adèle is a book about addiction to sex and Leïla Slimani shows what this means for the eponymous main character in an almost claustrophobic way.

This is a story about a gay teenager in the 1960s and early 70s at a time, and in institutions, which had little understanding and less tolerance for gay youth. Sharing one special singer, there is only one place where he can find her – an Adele concert in Rome.She's not attracted to her partners: she just needs to know that she is wanted, desired, she just needs to feel that rush of physical sexual response. While other men would pay hundreds to only have her body, he would pay thousands more to have her soul, even for a night. Lucy stole her friend Rose’s ‘happily ever after’ because she wanted Rose’s husband and Lucy always gets what she wants.

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