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