With Berlin’s International Literature Festival, another cultural event made tentative steps back to normality last month. I read with great interest Leïla Slimani’s opening speech in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and fortunately it has made its way into the wide world with an English translation in pdf format available here. Also, I suppose in the interest of the “International …” bit, Slimani delivers her address in English so I have embedded the YouTube video (54:00) below. (I have to say, with opening passages that invites her listeners to join her in a thought experiment, Slimini immediately outs herself as a Virginia Woolf acolyte; for such is a technique not dissimilar to that which Woolf often used in her speeches (including those that were to form the basis of “A Room of One’s Own”). Sure enough Woolf is quickly catapulted to center stage; the direct quotes come from a wonderful 931 essay called “Professions for Women” – to be read here, and found in many anthologies of her work.)
A star of the literary scene in Europe and beyond, Leïla Slimani carefully constructs an argument that is concerned with some of the contemporary tendencies; ones that stifle constructive discourse and shy at the complexities of literature. Having encouraged us to (do a Virginia Woolf) and brutally kill off the angels within; she reminds us of the fates of the famous, the notorious, the literary heroines of yore; how little girls are molded to fit an ideal and come of age conditioned to please and in fear of transgression; how our voices are so often curtailed or silenced. And it is here, and with her own experiences, she connects with the fashionable preoccupation of renegotiating the past, of speaking at one’s own peril! For, she maintains, we must speak up, and without trepidation, without fear of reprisal (yes, of being cancelled.) Writers and artists (but we all really) must have the freedom to break down walls and resist categorizations and assumptions – and this can only be achieved when we are in command of our voice. There is more, so whether watched or read or both, Ms. Slimani’s words are well worthy of our time and thought.
Having now done so, and following the recent talk surrounding Slimani’s new book, In the Country of Others, the first of a trilogy and this one set mostly in post-World War II Morocco, and with very much familial biographical elements, I surprise myself by the realization that I have not read any of her work (slender though it is; to date only three novels) – even successfully “not reading” Lullaby (The Perfect Nanny in the US) her controversial, prize-winning and best-selling novel of a children-murdering nanny (well, that’s the short version, presumably there is much more to it than that). Why I deemed this a success on my part I couldn’t say. Subject matter? Aversion to hype? The first would imply an over-sensitivity that I would be quick to deny; the second, an affliction that I have often overcome. Whatever the reason, its status suggested it as an appropriate literary starter. But alas, at least here in Germany, it remains so popular that I must wait my turn at the local library.
However, the German translation of her 2015 first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogres, which was published outside France in 2019 after the success of Lullaby, was available. All das zu verlieren, meaning literally in English “everything to lose” and which was published as Adèle in English, was certainly a difficult introduction to this lauded writer. Normally, perhaps, I would have read the dust-jacket blurb and thought: well, rather not. (I swear I am of an age where I struggle with contemporary twenty-somethings or thirty-somethings with husbands or wives and/or lovers, kids, parents – none of whom understand them – doing what they sincerely believe to be radical!) What could this Adèle, for that is the thirty-something (with husband and child, et cetera) subject’s name, have to say to me?
Well, as it turns out, nothing much. Vacuous, self-absorbed, as cold as the driven snow; respite coming only in the heat without warmth of serial, arbitrary and very rough sex. I could muster little sympathy for the circumstances surrounding Adèle’s compulsions and addictions – borne of chronic boredom and a lifelong of, some real but others imagined, injustices, nor could I accept her stylized version of self; as a victim of bourgeoisie norms retaliating by turning man’s own favored weapon against him. A bourgeoisie, mind you, to which though not born, fervently aspired to. (She could be none other than a doctor’s wife! Think, Madame Bovary.) And it’s not just sex; it’s alcohol, drugs, it’s not eating, it’s social isolation. She doesn’t like anything much – or anybody. To what end? Are we to imagine that a well-situated woman can not break free of societal constraints (exaggerated it seems to me) in any other way than through a brutal and vacuous course of self-debasement? To the very end, it remained unclear to me what lurked there in her past that led her down this path of self-destruction and deceit. For something more than an unsympathetic, indiscreet mother and a passive, perhaps broken, father, and a messy teenage “first time” must surely lay behind her pathological state of mind and being. And as irritating throughout, from the get go really, are all those “last times” that weren’t – that were never going to be – because, like everything else with Adèle, good intentions were not good enough. Ultimately, it seems to me, she who wanted it both ways has ended up with nothing much at all and, worse, dragged her family into the murky no-mans-land of her discontent. Even if it is so that Adèle’s behavior has exposed and laid bare the fiction behind the middle-class facade, and that her family is a part of that fiction, fair is it not – for the little Lucien absolutely not, but nor for the duped Richard, whose personal inadequacies (primarily read as: lack of sexual prowess) are hardly in relation to the humiliation brought upon him.
The French title, Dans le jardin d’Ogre, avoided in both the German and English translations, is worthy of consideration. In the opening passages of the novel, Adèle seems to be emerging from some (probably brief!) period of (sexual) abstinence and begins to fantasize and obsess again after the most grotesque forms of physical debasement; a longing to be, she says, a doll, a plaything in the garden of a monster. Long ago, one man – his name was Odysseus – on his journey home revealed himself to a one-eyed breed of man-eating monsters to be “no man”, a nobody – a ploy that enabled his escape, but that which came at a price, not only in hindering his own journey but to be paid for by those around him as they fell prey not only to the Cyclops but then to the Laestrygonians with their even greater appetite. Slimani, it seems to me, is appropriating (unknowingly?) the man-eaters of myth and the modern metaphor for …what? … a polyamorous woman, then connecting them in the person of Adèle and her insatiable appetites. In this garden: Who is the keeper and who is being kept? Who is cultivating and what exactly is being cultivated?
Remaining a moment with my epic divergence. Imagine: Penelope is upstairs awaiting a return to domestic bliss, but the wait becomes too long and tedious and she finds herself instead aroused by the hedonism (of suitors and whores) downstairs. Should Penelope have chosen to act upon the temptations of the latter, I am fairly confident in saying things would not have ended well for her. This same fate I fear for Adèle.
And, it is with the stark choices that I am most dissatisfied; for Slimani could have given Adèle more contour as a character, more giveness and less take, allowed her to explore the furthest boundaries for sure, but boundaries blurred, decked her with the will and fortitude – and, importantly, imagination – to find her way out, seek a better and kinder way towards fulfillment. Instead we have here delivered this shallow shell of a woman – a “no woman”.
In German translation, the writer, Slimani, reads wonderfully well – the sentences are precise, even elegant, and I can’t imagine that would be any different in the original nor English translation. Some passages reveal her undeniable mastery of realism, and it isn’t always ugly, while others tend to be cliché ridden and deliberately provocative. I hear her deliberating, that is not necessary, provocation has to come out of the gut not the head. Except for…well, you know … not that much actually happens; the plot is scant, but, then, life is never an ordered affair fitting tightly some narrative structure. One senses a writer who is not without humor, but in this book she seems intent on stifling it.
All das zu verlieren is imperfect in many ways, and frankly sometimes hard to take, but has introduced me to an obviously talented writer, and suggests more and better to come. I hope so. Because I have now committed to reading the much talked about ‘killer nanny’, and Leïla Slimani’s journey into the generation of her grandparents, a generation straddling two cultures, that of France and of the Maghreb, and the literary telling of a family’s search for identity (only hinted at – by the depressive Algerian father – in the book just read), a thematic that personally and profoundly interests her, really does interest me.