Good Girls
Lauren Elkin: Leïla Slimani, 21 February 2019
Adèle
by Leïla Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor.
Faber, 209 pp., £12.99, February 2019,978 0 571 33195 6 Show More
by Leïla Slimani, translated by Sam Taylor.
Faber, 209 pp., £12.99, February 2019,
“... For an unsexy book about sex addiction, you can’t do much better than Leïla Slimani’s Adèle. The new novel from the writer of the bestselling, Prix Goncourt-winning Lullaby (2016) asks the reader to watch uncomfortably as its protagonist moves from man to man, having many sexual encounters but zero orgasms. Adèle, an attractive Parisian woman in her thirties, with a husband, Richard, a child and a desultory job as a journalist, has what the DSM-5 would describe as a hypersexual disorder, that is, if sex addiction weren’t such a controversial diagnosis that the DSM-5 clinicians decided not to include it ... ”