Adèle by Leïla Slimani review – a tough read, but a bracing one

A doctor’s wife is hooked on sex with strangers in this elegant, enigmatic follow-up to Lullaby

Adèle is addicted to sex, with more or less any man who isn’t her husband and whom she doesn’t know too well: as soon as any hint of intimacy or routine announces itself in her liaisons, she cuts them off. Although she is easily frightened by groups of drunken men on the streets, she seeks out dangerous situations in which she has the illusion of control – on press trips she makes as a lacklustre, uninterested journalist, with guys she hires to bring drugs to her apartment, in the seedy surroundings of a sex shop in the Boulevard de Clichy. Occasionally, she will demand to be physically hurt, as when she asks the drug dealers to smash her genitals, leaving her vagina “just a shard of broken glass now, a maze of ridges and fissures”.

Slimani’s slender, elegantly written and translated novel is filled with such disturbing images, and her capacity to shock will come as little surprise to readers of her previous novel, Lullaby, which opened by revealing the brutal aftermath of the murder of two small children. And in that novel, too, she took us into the painful, tumbled vortex of female subjectivity, with its complex trade-offs between obligation and appetite, its desire for liberation tussling with the question of what that liberation might yield.

Continue reading...

from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HzVsPN

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mine management and predictive maintenance are top priorities for miners

Image
While miners are starting to trial and make small investments in technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and cloud computing, the traditionally conservative mining sector remains focused on improving efficiency and productivity by continuing to invest in mine management software and predictive maintenance. GlobalData’s latest report, Global Mine-Site Technology Adoption Survey 2018 , reveals that while investment by the majors is currently well ahead of mid-tier miners and producing juniors, higher shares of the latter two groups are planning investments in mine management software and predictive maintenance given their immediate impact on improving productivity. Source: GlobalData Mining Intelligence Center The report includes data and analysis from the company’s survey of over 200 worldwide mine sites which investigated the extent to which mines had invested in 13 different technologies ranging from communication systems to drones, predictive maintenance
Read more

Down with the kids: can mining ever be cool?

“Do you want to win a bucket load of cash? Of course you do!” is the eye-catching strapline of the Mining Association of Nova Scotia’s (MANS) annual Mining ROCKS! contest. It offers cash prizes totalling C$8,000 for junior high and high school students who produce the most interesting and engaging videos about mining across five categories. Held between October 2018 and 22 February 2019, the contest hopes to inspire young people to teach themselves about the mining industry in Canada and beyond. Sean Kirby, executive director of MANS, says the association launched the competition because the industry needs to do better at explaining itself to the public and, in particular, reaching out to young people to educate them about mining, minerals and geoscience. “We started the Mining ROCKS! video contest as a way to appeal to young people, to give them a reason to want to learn about what we do by doing their own research,” he says. Attracting the next generation of miners Ingratiating
Read more

GR Engineering wins OZ Minerals Northern Wellfield project contract

OZ Minerals has awarded a contract to GR Engineering Services for the design and construction of the Northern Wellfield for the Carrapateena project located approximately 160km north of Port Augusta in South Australia. The engineering, procurement and construction contract is valued at A$16.3m ($11.77m). For the Northern Wellfield project, GR Engineering will provide the detailed design, survey, supply, transportation, construction, testing and commissioning services for the development of the trunkline and transfer pumping stations associated with four wells. The Carrapateena mineral processing plant, which is currently under construction, will obtain water through the wellfield project. The Northern Wellfield project will include access roads, pipeline corridors, staging tanks, wellheads and pumps to source groundwater from deep underground aquifers for providing raw saline water to the mining operations. “This work demonstrates GR Engineering’s credentials in the supply of proc
Read more