On the surface, Adèle has a perfect life. She is a successful journalist in Paris, living with her well-off husband and young son. She wants for nothing--except that she craves, constantly and without restraint, sex. Her pursuit of it--with strangers, with coworkers, with distant friends, with anyone who is willing and able--defines her days and nights, filling her life with a complicated web of lies and illicit affairs. Leila Slimani (The Perfect Nanny) paints a vivid and detailed picture of addiction and sexuality in Adèle, translated from the French by Sam Taylor. For though she is exhausted by her exploits, disgusted by them even, Adèle cannot imagine her life without them: "Her obsessions devour her. She is helpless to stop them."
There's more to it than sex, however, and more to it than passion or connection or other emotions commonly tied up in physical relationships. In the face of a life of monotony and repetition, caring for her children and caring for her husband and repeating the actions of every "bourgeois mother" that's come before her, her sexual exploits give her a secret to cradle close to herself, a way to define herself against the world. If she gives them up, she knows, she will never be able look at strangers' staring and tell herself, "Let them think whatever they want. They'll never know the truth."
In this, Adèle moves from an exploration of eroticism and addiction to an exploration of motherhood--indeed, womanhood--that is as insightful as it is graphic and shockingly universal despite its unusual premise. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm