Nicole Abadie

speaker

355 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2018 last heard May 2020

Nicole Abadie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bookshelf · On Mark Brandi's The Rip, Dervla McTiernan's The Scholar, Leïla Slimani's Adèle and Mohammed Hanif's Red Birds · 15 Mar 2019 podcast

The opening words are, Adele has been good.

But a few paragraphs later, you see her getting into the shower, saying she wants to scratch herself to rip her body in two.

She wants someone to grab her and smash her skull into the glass door.

She wants to be devoured, sucked, swallowed whole.

So right from the beginning, we have this paradox.

She's been good and then we hear these descriptions of what she wants to happen.

Something that's quite striking, just a small point, is that after one of these scenes in which she has this reckless sex with a stranger in an alley, her girlfriend Lauren comes out and Adele says, can you walk me home?

I'm too scared to walk home by myself at night.

Given what she's just done, it's hard to see what she could actually be more scared of, having just engaged in reckless sex with a man she's just found on the street.

Interesting.

I haven't read that book recently.

I probably read it about 30 years ago, if not more, and it was one of my favourite books ever at the time.

I don't recall if there is the same sort of writing.

Certainly I didn't feel as engaged or enraptured by this book as I did by The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I saw that he had described it, Kate, as a book that was funny about sad things, and I can't think of a better way to describe it.

At the time that he started writing it,

He was grieving for some lost friends, including a friend who ran a bookshop and had held an event there and was shortly after murdered, as have a number of other journalists been murdered.

He was also reporting in his role as a journalist on people who'd been abducted by intelligence agencies.

So he was starting from a dark place when he wrote it.

It took him seven years to write.

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