Adele

Product Information

Lucy stole her friend Rose’s ‘happily ever after’ because she wanted Rose’s husband and Lucy always gets what she wants. Now Adèle, the novel she wrote before that breakthrough success, has been translated into English by Sam Taylor.

She wants to be debased rather than empowered (except she's the one who picks up and drops men), to be the object rather than the wielder of society's gendered gaze. The Great War is over and it's a new decade of glamorous promise but a generation of men and women who survived the extreme trauma and tragedy will never be the same.The authors struggle to distinguish the voices of the three protagonists, occasionally causing them to blend together.

It appears that the authors invested considerable effort in weaving Adele's songs into the tapestry of their characters' lives but overlooked other crucial elements of storytelling. 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. This riveting novel/memoir by underground icon Adele Bertei situates the making of a survivor rebel against the background of the chaotic side of 1960’s America.The action is mostly set in the beautiful surroundings of a chateau in the south of France and this glamourous location pulled me right in! I mean, the girl isn't having fun - at one point she is in a room with two male prostitutes, high on cocaine, and gets one of them to knee her violently in the crotch so she can actually 'feel something'. Her story casts a powerful spotlight on the struggles of women trapped in abusive relationships, delivering a poignant message of strength and resilience. Adèle is, seemingly, the contented wife of a surgeon, raising a son that she adores while excelling at her job as a journalist.

I found myself wondering what kind of novel it could be if her husband were better in bed, or if Adèle were less submissive and had moved further beyond Emma Bovary in her desires. I wonder how many book reviews – my own, and other people's – have begun with the words '[name of main character] seems to have it all'. Adele probably sounds like it might be a titillating book (in a vicariously pleasurable, morally backward way) but the sex is actually really unerotic; just ugly and sad while still being uncomfortably graphic. She hires hotel rooms, drags them into alleyways, drops to her knees in the cloakrooms of dinner parties. But her dream come true turns into a nightmare when she falls pregnant and Hugh makes it clear he’s been there, done that and doesn’t want to do it all again.Whether Slimani’s novel can be categorised as erotic or not, seems to me a matter depending on the personal taste of the reader - unlike other reviewers (and the blurb) I didn’t experience this disengaged account of Adèle’s excesses as erotic.

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 (though Adè le is actually her debut novel and was published before Lullaby in France), which opened by revealing the brutal aftermath of the murder of two small children.Even her ever more desperately seeking to feel anything at all, and the larger and larger betraying of everyone who cares for her required to achieve this, including her child and hospitalised husband, didn't make me feel much for her.