Adèle is bored. Because her life is easy. Her husband is a doctor, the child is healthy, her job as a journalist offers her travel and freedoms. However, there is a problem. She faces her life with the same refusal as her work. She would have to do something - and do nothing.
She would have to call her local contacts in Tunisia to write an article about Tunisia, but Adèle hates her job and the idea that she has to work to live on it. She always wanted only one thing: attention. However, paying attention to her boss does not mean anything to her since she knows that he knows nothing about anything. So she invents a whole article. She despises everyone. Himself most of all.
Leïla Slimani was born in 1981 in Morocco. She studied political science in Paris, then worked as a journalist for the magazine "Jeune Afrique". She married, her husband is an economist, she had children, she wrote her debut "All this to lose". It became a success. Especially in Morocco: On a reading tour there, "losing all this" has led readers to confide in Leïla Slimani. In Morocco, adultery is a prison sentence. The split between tradition and instinct, between self-realization and coercion, there it is very comprehensible.
She does not show anything, she says it all
There, Adèles shocked people to feel humility: sex with different men. Adultery! In the hours of regret, the protagonist knows how to appreciate her boring husband and her supposedly boring life again. Because she opens up, it could all lose her too.
What was able to develop a social furor in Morocco in 2014 leaves one here and today - the German translation has just come out - cold. Adèle is a woman whose disunity one does not understand. She lives in the present Paris, a divorce would not be a scandal. But she never thinks about such alternatives. Adèle is a character who has no contact with her surroundings or with herself. Her son, Lucien, feels she is a burden and a duty she can not get used to.
That's how it is in Slimani's novel. The author does not show the reader anything, she tells him everything. So Adèle has become a wife and mother because these roles should give her an aura of respectability. And motherhood had been to make Adèle's way out of boredom. The reader does not have to draw conclusions.
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14.05.2019, 13:30 clock
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Leila Slimani
To lose all this: novel
Publishing company:
Luchterhand Literaturverlag
Pages:
224
Price:
EUR 22,00
Translated by:
Amelia Thoma
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The plan did not work out, that's understood from the first page. However, Adèle does not seem to have real problems with motherhood. At least they are not described. The child remains marginal figure. The protagonist lies on the bathroom floor pretending she's getting ready. That in turn makes her husband ready. Because he is waiting for them, together they have an important social date. Of course Adèle is boring. The bathroom floor is also not exciting.
The explanation for this refusal is Adèle's growing up. Naturally. Adèle's mother says it this way: Adèle always wanted the big life. What that should be, remains exceptionally unsaid. Maybe it has something to do with sex. Because sex is the only element charged with meaning in the novel. It stands as a symbol of liveliness, as a symbol for breaking out of conventions, as a symbol of finitude, for emancipation and for oppression. Oh, for everything actually.
From time to time kitsch
Of course, Adele's husband Richard does not have the greatest libido. Instead of giving orgasms, he prefers to give away expensive brooches, which therefore appear to the protagonist like a fetter.
Time and again one wonders when reading: Adèle, why do not you act? You have all the means. Then do something else, God! Or at least think about it. But "the other" does not seem to exist. There is only the woodcut-like representation of a stuffy, orderly family life and its opposite: sex. All this comes in a boring language reflecting the contents, which surprises off with too kitsch, such as: "She wants to be a doll in the garden of a monster" or: "The night is warm and the thunderstorm in the distance leaves the horses restlessly neighing. "
AFP
Author Slimani: A shocker in Morocco
With "Sex and lies: talking to women from the Islamic world" Slimani published a nonfiction book. In 2016, her second novel "Then Sleep You" also appeared about a murdering nanny. He became a bestseller, she received the Prix Goncourt. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron named her ambassador to the Frankofonie. All this sounds much more diverse than their debut reads.