Review by New York Times Review
to be A recovering addict is to admit that your highest purpose is to avoid your worst impulses. Whether you regard this as a practical fact of life or a tragedy depends on your relationship to pleasure, and whether your particular pleasures are endorsed or reviled by your social environment. In the case of Adele Robinson, the pleasure is risky sex and the social environment is upper-middle-class Paris. Adele pounds champagne, eats potted yogurt, wears scarves and destroys lives. You in yet? "Adele" is the first novel by Leila Slimani, the French-Moroccan author of "The Perfect Nanny," which won one of France's most prestigious literary awards, the Prix Goncourt, in 2016 and was translated into almost three dozen languages. In the wake of nannymania, Slimani's debut novel has been made available in English, albeit with a title downgrade from its original "In the Garden of the Ogre." Adele is 35 years old, beautiful, a newspaper reporter who has been married nine years to a successful doctor. Despite her good fortune she harbors some Madame Bovary tendencies, aching for a life of pampered thrills and finding her own existence - a spacious apartment, luxury vacations - shabby. Her family's money "smells of work, of sweat and long nights spent at the hospital," she determines, "ft is not a passport to idleness or decadence." So she finds decadence by compulsively seducing strangers, co-workers and acquaintances, loathing the sex but finding comfort in the immediate aftermath, when she is "suspended between two worlds, the mistress of the present tense." That interim of numbness might seem like an underwhelming reward, but to someone as miserable as Adele it offers reprieve. Her descent is marked by the usual signs of addiction : an eroding sense of limits, a stream of banal lies, a metabolic incapacity for contentment. "Nothing ever happens fast enough," Adele thinks. Her life becomes a frenzied scheme to avoid boredom. Although the misery is universal, this story is uniquely, and often amusingly, French. Adele smokes too much. She spurns Hermes gifts from her husband, drinks wine at lunch and punishes herself after a night of regrettable sex by buying, and then barely pecking at, a "dry, cold pain au chocolat at the worst bakery in the neighborhood." The book would be a lot less fun if Adele were vaping and knocking back Munchkins like a red-blooded American adulteress. Possibly because of the book's Frenchness, nothing about Adele's behavior is pathologized until the very last pages. She submits only belatedly to therapy. Nobody tells her that she has a disease or ought to spend some time leafing through the D.S.M. Instead, Slimani approaches Adele's habits as a study in the art of tending a secret. In forming her identity Adele dismisses the traditional ingredients - gender, race, job, class, motherhood - and focuses entirely on her ability to maintain a hidden life. Private domestic espionage is her creed. If the central idea of the book is a fascinating one, the prose is not always impeccable. Dialogue can be flat. Clichés are abundant. One character "plays his last card," another "refuses to move an inch," and a third pleads, "You can't go on like this." Still, I liked this earlier novel much more than "The Perfect Nanny," which doesn't have an everyday iconoclast like Adele: a person who finds work boring, motherhood tedious, friends overrated and marriage a trial. Adele has glanced at the covenant of modern womanhood - the idea that you can have it all or should at least die trying - and detonated it. molly young is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the co-author, with Joana Avillez, of "D-C-T."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 27, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
U.S. readers embraced Slimani's Prix Goncourt-winning second novel, The Perfect Nanny (2017); this is the first English translation of her debut. Parisian journalist Adèle is at the mercy of her sex addiction. Although a need for anonymous, generally unpleasant encounters often distracts and physically weakens her, she easily hides her second life from her boring doctor husband, Richard, and their toddler son. Readers will catch glimpses of Slimani's chillingly incisive characterizations, which bolstered The Perfect Nanny's tense psychodrama. As much as this story's narrator reveals, though, Adèle somehow stays just out of reach. Richard wants Adèle to quit her job, have their second child, and trade their Paris apartment for a sprawling provincial manse; Adèle finds this arrangement akin to death. When an accident makes Richard completely dependent on her, she ratchets up her recklessness. French Moroccan Slimani, who also serves as President Macron's representative for the promotion of French language and culture, offers a night-dark, literary portrayal of a woman caught in an abyss between her ultimate freedom and utter self-annihilation.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Slimani's fascinating follow-up to The Perfect Nanny chronicles the extramarital trysts of 35-year-old AdA"le Robinson. AdA"le's oblivious husband, Richard, often works long hours as a surgeon, though he's growing tired of his job at the hospital in Paris. He often floats the idea of moving with AdA"le and their three-year-old son, Lucien, to the deserted countryside. This idea enrages AdA"le, who spends her waking hours sating her sexual needs (her sexual life composes most of the story). Her job as a journalist proves handy, since she can come and go as she pleases. She often asks her best friend, Lauren, to cover for her when she goes out at night. AdA"le has seduced everyone from her boss, Cyril, to Lauren's lover to Richard's unattractive colleague, Xavier. She keeps a second cell phone that's crammed with the numbers of men she's willing to bed again. In the meantime, she does the bare minimum at work and will hand off her son at a moment's notice. The story takes a turn when it focuses on Richard and how he deals with his wife once he finds out about her sex life. Though some readers might feel the novel waits too long to explore why its protagonist feels compelled to behave the way she does, this is nevertheless a skillful character study. Slimani's ending is the perfect conclusion to this memorable snapshot of sex addiction. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sex-obsessed woman spirals out of control in this artful, edgy novel. On paper, 35-year-old Adle Robinson has it all: a successful husband, a healthy child, a beautiful Parisian apartment, and a promising career as a newspaper journalist. In reality, though, her nine-year marriage to gastroenterologist Richard is less passionate than perfunctory, her young son, Lucien, is a burden, and she fakes her way through work by fabricating quotes and plagiarizing other reporters. Adle's sole ambition in life is to be wanted, and the only thing that fulfills her desire is illicit sex. Adle has slept with countless men, from strangers to co-workers to her best friend's boyfriend. She knows that she should quit, but every time she tries to remain faithful to Richard, she fails, and each new relapse is more debauched than the last. Can Adle master her urges, or will she lose everything in her quest to "fill" herself? Slimani's staccato, present-tense prose fosters agitation and unease, while the narrative's third-person perspective lends the tale a voyeuristic air. Although some of the secondary characters lack depth, Adle has it in spades; singularly unlikable but eminently relatable, her actions are considered taboo, but the ennui and anxiety from which they stem are universal. The book's denouement may frustrate readersbut then, that rather seems the point.Franco-Moroccan author Slimani (The Perfect Nanny, 2018) delivers an unflinching exploration of female self-sacrifice and the elusive nature of satisfaction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
