Adele

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Photograph: Stephane Cardinale/Corbis/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Leïla Slimani reveals the hellishness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of hell. Like Flaubert, though, she empathises with her character, even at her silliest (Adèle falls asleep with her face in an ashtray), and occasionally we feel something like Flaubert’s interest in the nuances of Adèle’s mind. What if it was reasonable rather than self-destructive or self-pitying for a woman to feel constricted by family life and ask for more?

That tale of a murderous nanny, exposing the fetid emotional growths fouling the bourgeois home, was Slimani’s second novelistic investigation of forbidden desires. Although the novel does contain some memorable moments, they are insufficient to rescue the overall reading experience. Adèle is addicted to sex, with more or less any man who isn’t her husband and whom she doesn’t know too well: as soon as any hint of intimacy or routine announces itself in her liaisons, she cuts them off. Dora is initially hesitant to commit to this final job, but she thinks she can trust her client Daniel.

However, the repeated inclusion of Adele's song lyrics in each chapter, while initially intriguing, eventually grew somewhat wearisome. The way it is written makes you truly believe you are reading fiction along with the abrupt realization that this all really happened to Bertei. Twist is one of the most original, amazing stories I’ve ever read—a story of innocence and brutality, of courage and faith and luck. It’s highly dysfunctional family, we get a glimpse yet of her parents and relationships with Rachard's family as well, and I think Slimani rather managed to render Adele’s inner life pretty well. What if you immured yourself in an utterly respectable life and then tried to fuck your way out of it?

The excitement soon turns to turmoil as her mother in law Margaret has lost her history, her health and her mind, and struggles to hold on to the secret she has never wanted to reveal.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.

But her subsequent confessionals about surviving infidelity, divorce and family life resonated considerably more widely and won her fans aorund the world. I assume it had to be a kind of psychological study of a person in the grip of addiction, in a tangle of desires impossible to satiate.

Before we dive deeper, let me clarify that my review isn't colored by any particular affinity or aversion to Adele's music. But though Adèle seeks power through sex, she’s attracted to powerful men and she relies on them to overpower her.

Her main reason for working as a journalist is that her schedule allows for a lot of excuses and cover-ups for her numerous extramarital sexual exploits.In many ways, Adèle is a modern-day Madame Bovary, but the book itself has less in common with Flaubert than with the sensation novels that Emma Bovary reads addictively.