She wishes she was just an object in the midst of a horde. She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole. She wants fingers pinching her breasts, teeth digging into her belly. She wants to be a doll in an ogre's garden.
I chose the above quote to open with for two reasons: The original French title for Adèle is “Dans le jardin de l’ogre” (which is much more intriguing in my opinion), and also because it's from page one of this book – the reader knows right from the start that there's something off about this Adèle. Author Leïla Slimani has stated that she was inspired to write a story of sex addiction after the DSK scandal and thought it would be interesting to flip it to the POV of a woman addict. On the one hand, that seems a loose connection – a middle-class wife and mother doesn't have the same sexual power as an influential politician who would eventually be accused of multiple sexual assaults – but Adèle's experiences here completely put me in mind of Michael Fassbender's performance in the movie “Shame”; the same joyless, unrewarding, self-harm that ultimately defines any kind of addiction; maybe sex addiction for ordinary people is the same for men and women, and as Slimani describes it here, it's just another route to a skid row of the soul. Adèle is a very French novel – it's interesting for a Canadian like me to read this kind of a story set in Paris, where sexual mores are a little different – and I can't say how much might have been lost in translation or my ignorance of social/cultural subtleties, but I was moved by Adèle's story – four stars is a rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)
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.Adèle Robinson is the thirty-five-year-old wife of a noted surgeon, living together with him and their three-year-old son in a chic Paris apartment. Her husband arranged a job in journalism for Adèle, and while at first she found it fulfilling, she now blows off meetings and deadlines as she arranges ever more risky sexual liaisons. Adèle seems incapable of human connection: she's frigid with her husband (who thinks himself above the animal desires anyway); she constantly screams at and abandons their child (who has been made whiny and tantrum-prone); she's a terrible friend (seducing the boyfriend of the “best friend” who provides alibis every time Adèle stays out all night); and when we meet Adèle's cold and manipulative mother, we're given small clues as to what childhood damage might have created a woman with such low self-esteem that she wants her body used and degraded. A note on Adèle's parentage: There's never any physical description given of Adèle (besides her being beautiful and anorexic), and her mother Simone is only described as kind of trashy, but her father's name is “Kader”, who has “long, tanned fingers”, and who is a nonpractising Muslim. As Slimani was born in Morocco, and as this book appears on the list of “Anticipated Literary Reads for Persons of Color 2019”, I kept wondering if Adèle is meant to be a person of colour – and I think it matters to the storyline. Was Adèle put on the Tunisia desk at work because she's supposed to be half-Tunisian? Is her constant (seemingly incongruous) fear of being raped as she walks at night related to her being marked as an interloper? Is a woman at a dinner party who complains of her nanny practising Ramadan (“You can't look after children when you're starving, can you?”) meant to be a dig at this beautiful daughter of a North African immigrant? And I can't help but wonder if Slimani left this ambiguous just to challenge my mental picture of what a well-off Parisian woman might look like.
The man's mouth tastes of wine and cigarillos. Of forest and the Russian countryside. She wants him, and this desire, to her, feels almost like a miracle. She wants it all: him, and his wife, and this affair, and these lies, and the texts they will send, and the secrets and the tears and even the inevitable goodbye. He slips her dress off. His surgeon's hands, long and bony, barely brush her skin. His gestures are assured, agile, delicious. He seems detached and then suddenly furious, uncontrollable. A strong sense of theatre; Adèle is thrilled. He is so close now that her head starts to spin. She is breathing too hard to think. She is limp, empty, at his mercy.The plot develops, and there's a crisis and a followup, and the narrative ends in a twisty place; but this really isn't about the plot. I see reviewers who don't like this book because they don't like Adèle – it's easy to be turned off by the terrible wife and mother who risks everything for dangerous sex; it's easy to be turned off by the blackout drunk who wets his pants; turned off by the methhead who snatches purses from old ladies. Yet in each of these cases, none of the addicts are even seeking pleasure; just oblivion from a painful existence; to go limp and empty as a doll in an ogre's garden. Slimani draws a compelling portrait of a woman with sex addiction, and in the end, Adèle deserves compassion, too. (On a final note: I had assumed that Slimani's last best-selling novel, The Perfect Nanny, was typical domestic noir; now I'll probably check it out.)
