Adele

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With no end in sight from her increasingly out-of-control behaviour, how long can she keep her private life from being exposed? While Adele only found meaning through sex, it was subtly implied at one point that Richard might have strong tendencies toward asexuality in some form or another. While other men would pay hundreds to only have her body, he would pay thousands more to have her soul, even for a night. In both cases, the rapid descents feel just about credible enough to tell us something about the form of vertigo Kundera defined.

While I've heard this book described as "subversive", I'm inclined to say this is the opposite of subversive writing.Tahar Ben Jelloun, reviewing it for one of the French papers, pointed out that most Moroccan novelists produce a first book about the maghrebain experience, whereas this is a purely French novel. One Last Secret is told through the eyes of an escort named Dora, and her testimony was utterly compelling. The attempt to align these songs with the characters' experiences felt forced, disrupting the natural flow of the narrative.

Despite Adèle’s obvious suffering and loneliness, I found it almost impossible to empathise with her, as Slimani depicts her protagonist as an utterly unlikeable woman, not because of her sexual debauchery but by underlining what an egotistical, bored and overindulged creature she is as a privileged petite bourgeoise ‘having it all’ – the distance to the character sharpened by Slimani’s detached and chilly style.Cela lui laisse tout le loisir pour le divertissement de cette inquiétude qui la taraude inlassablement. Despite the affection she feels for her son and her husband, she can’t resist to seize every opportunity she gets – a dinner party with her husband’s colleagues, a visit of an art gallery, an after work drink - to give her body what it ask for. I actually thought Richard’s motivations were more interesting than Adele’s, she’s treated him like complete shit and he doesn’t even seem to be all that arsed about her sexually yet he wants to keep her by his side and change her into someone she never will be. When he finds out about Adele’s shenanigans, instead of reacting in a way that would actually make sense and throwing her out on her skanky ass, he decides to deal with the problem by treating her as a victim of her own desires and trying to ‘save’ her.