Cruel Optimism and Obsessive Appetites in Leïla Slimani’s Novels

Abstract

This article explores obsessive appetites in Leïla Slimani’s Chanson Douce [Sweet Song], translated into English in the UK with the title Lullaby and in the US as The Perfect Nanny, and Dans le jardin de l’ogre [In the Ogre’s Garden], translated as Adèle. I draw on Lauren Berlant’s ideas on the connections between obsessive eating and obsessive sexuality in Cruel Optimism, highlighting how in Slimani’s work, eating disorders and sexual compulsions constitute repeated enactments of failed attachments and are triggered by a form of systemic trauma (which Berlant calls ‘crisis ordinariness’) rooted in sociocultural alienation. The desperate quest for intimacy in Chanson douce and for anti-intimacy in Dans le jardin de l’ogre leads to self-destruction, figured in self-starvation, in damaging sexual relations, and ultimately in murder. The reader, I argue, gets caught up in the destructive repetitions and in the desire to move beyond them to some sort of satisfying ending, which in these texts entails the brutal silencing of female desires and agency (written into the narratives from the very beginning). Reading here is thus shown to be bound up in the violence of cruel optimism and its obsessive appetites.