Adele is a Parisian wife and mother with an insatiable need for sex. This leads her to cheat on her husband incessantly with a bewildering assortment of men. Adele is indiscriminate in her favours; married, single, comely, ugly all are candidates for her relentless lust.

Adele's surgeon husband Richard is blissfully unaware of what is going on. He sees a happy family and dreams of relocating to a bucolic place in the country. This is, of course, something Adele is not remotely interested in.

Adele indulges in a lot of bad sex, and this has the inevitable effect of the novel being mostly a monotonous series of bad sex scenes. She is a pretty unlikeable character, principally because Slimani does not really offer any rationale for Adele's egregious behaviour. Towards the end the author offers the merest hint of a cause for this aberrant behaviour, but it's nowhere near overt enough to make you like her protagonist. Richard is not very sympathetic either. I mostly felt sorry for their little boy, to whom Slimani gives short shrift and does nothing to examine the effect all this dysfunction might have on the sole innocent bystander. ( )

Although much of the middle of this novel involved Adèle jumping in and out of bed with many many men of any type, a story begins to involve and it is in the last chapters we can see a real writer at work. We see modern Paris with its bars, restaurants and parks.

This is not just a novel of adulatory and a sex-obsessed Madame Bovary. I look forward to reading more of Slimani’s novels as they are translated. . ( )

Over de ongezonde relatie van een echtpaar en de grenzen van de liefde ( )

Leila Slimani has achieved the admirable feat of writing a novella ostensibly about sex but expunging every hint of eroticism from it. This is no small achievement. But the book is not so much about sex of course, but about addiction. Any reader who has ever been addicted to anything, be it alcohol, drugs (particularly cocaine), gambling or whatever it might be, will empathise with Adele.

The endless chasing of the original feeling, the dulled response to greater extremes pushing you to try / take more and more, the organisation of your entire life around the next hit, the deeper and more desperate subterfuges, the betrayal of friends and family, the gradual loss of personality.... well, its all here and Slimani describes it perfectly. The line that summed it up for me was, when at a dinner party, "Adele was bored. She wanted to be naked. She wanted someone to touch her breasts", the key word here being "someone" - it really doesn't matter much who.

And with the possible exception of one particularly brutal scene, the aftermath of which leads Adele damaged and forgetting an important duty to her husband, the reader isn't encouraged to judge her. Its a desperate, joyless almost blank existence - its our sympathy that should be elicited. But as the ending makes clear, addicts can't really be helped. They have to be ready to help themselves

Slimani has said that the origin of this book was in the confession of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the (male) politician who admitted to being a sex addict. I don't know though - the tone reminds me more of "The Sexual Life Of Catherine M" by the journalist and art critic Catherine Millet, an equally joyless and bleak account of her own sex addiction. With some references to The Story of O as well, although unlike O and to some extent Catherine M as well, at least Adele is not under the control of others

Recommended, but bleak, and thank goodness its not any longer frankly ( )

3.5 stars
This is a different type of book than I regularly read. I wasn't sure what to think at first, but it has been floating around in my head since, so it left an impact. Slimani's narrative is almost clinical as she describes in a very matter of fact manner Adele's insatiable compulsion to rid her mind of herself through purely physical releases with strangers. Eventually, her sexual addiction starts to affect her marriage and son, fracturing the carefully composed façade she has created for herself. In all cases she looks to men as the solution to her unhappiness without seeing that this dependence is the problem. As "perfect" wife/mother or sexualised women she is being controlled by men. She is either captive to the male gaze and her expectation that sexual encounters will make her feel better or captive to her husband whose idealist worship of her is suffocating.
I didn't feel sorry for Adele as a character, she's not particularly likeable, but I did feel sad for her. ( )