Adultery by Paulo Coelho
I listened to Coelho's Adultery on audiobook. Linda, a journalist in Geneva with the life she is supposed to want, starts an affair, and the book is really about her boredom and numbness.
I listened to this one on audiobook, checked out through Libby on the library app, and it made for a fun few evenings sitting with the thoughts of the narrator, Linda. Next to The Alchemist, with its deserts and omens and personal destiny, Adultery goes somewhere else entirely. It stays inside one woman's head and asks why a comfortable life can feel like nothing at all.
Linda is a journalist in Geneva with the money and the marriage and the kids, the version of life you are supposed to want, and she feels empty inside it. She reconnects with an old flame, an ex she interviews for a story, and starts an affair. The book is really about what the affair is trying to fix.
It came out in 2014 and runs around 270 pages.
What stuck with me is how little the affair has to do with the other man. It is about boredom, and about how scared she is of feeling nothing for the rest of her life, so she picks a wild, reckless thing partly because it makes her feel something, anything. I kept thinking the restlessness was the real subject, not the cheating.
She also spends a lot of the book wrestling with whether she is a bad person for any of it. Coelho does not hand you a clean answer. He lets her sit in the question of whether loyalty and passion can live in the same place, and whether suppressing a desire is wisdom or just fear wearing a respectable coat.
It surprised me how openly the book treats her as depressed. There is very little that is sexy about it. She is numb and detached and looking for a way back to feeling like herself, and the affair is one of the messy, not-very-good ways she tries to get there.
After The Alchemist this reads very differently. There are no parables here and no fable, it is close and personal and a little uncomfortable, and the main character is a woman in crisis where he usually writes a wandering seeker.
I rated it five stars, flaws and all, because it asked me good questions about the gap between a life that looks fine on paper and how it actually feels to live it. Good but not great is the thought Linda lives inside, and I suspect it is a familiar one.
Memoirs of a Geisha is another novel about longing and the distance between desire and the life you actually live.
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