Adultery by Paulo Coelho
A Deep Dive into Passion, Monotony, and Self-Discovery
I listened to this one on audiobook, checked out through Libby on the library app. It made for a fun few evenings sitting with the thoughts of the narrator, Linda. Most people know Paulo Coelho from 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. She has the money, the marriage, 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 less about the affair than about what the affair is trying to fix.
For the record, it came out in 2014 and runs around 270 pages.
What stuck with me is that the affair is never really about the other man. It is about boredom, and about how scared she is of feeling nothing for the rest of her life. 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.
The part that surprised me was how openly the book treats her as depressed. This is not a sexy love-affair story dressed up as one. 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 do it.
If you only know Coelho from The Alchemist, this will read very differently. No parables, no fable. It is close and personal and a little uncomfortable, and the main character is a woman in crisis rather than the wandering seeker he usually writes.
I rated it five stars. It is not a perfect book, but it asked me good questions about the gap between a life that looks fine on paper and how it actually feels to live it. If you have ever caught yourself thinking your life was good but not great, you will recognize Linda.
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