Book review: Adele, by Leila Slimani

Adele Robinson is a successful, attractive woman in her 30s. She has a handsome surgeon husband at home, a good career as a journalist in Paris and a young son. But she also has a secret: an addiction to sex – unpleasant, loveless sex with strangers.

There is nothing erotic about Adele’s liaisons: she merely has an itch which needs scratching, in increasingly violent, disturbing and unpleasant ways. Her need is dealt with in no different a way to an addiction to nicotine, or to heroin. She is an addict, something which those around her struggle to handle and which she seems to accept as a part of her, apparently feeling no remorse or guilt for her conquests, who range from her friend’s partner to her editor at work.

Her character is absolutely unsympathetic, yet strangely compelling. She appears to have little passion for anyone or anything in her life, including her child, her husband of nine years or even her job, into which she puts only the bare minimum amount of effort, finding it interesting only in that it allows her to “invent secret rendezvous, without having to justify herself”.