leifalreadyexists 's review for:

Lullaby by Leïla Slimani

3.0

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As much an admission of societal fractures as a thriller about the psychological reconstruction of a woman's narrative, Lullaby builds up a world of familial disarray and makes a spectacle of their consequences. The pieces are familiar: aspiring middle-class parents, lonely women alienated from society, children whose care is a matter of business. The attachments are obsessional:

She thinks that she could stare at them for hours without ever getting bored. That she would be content to watch them live, working the shadows so that everything was perfect, sot hat the mechanism never jammed. She has the intimate conviction now, the burning and painful conviction that her happiness belongs to them. That she is theirs and they are hers.

And then there is the workshop-perfect opening sentences, so lurid that they serve as openings on the book's cover itself: "The baby is dead. It took only a matter of seconds." No matter that these sentences are 1) unsubstantiated by the text (there is little attention to Adam's death, in the end) and 2) a sensational statement in bad faith with the novel itself, which demonstrates that, no, the fantasy of individual action (wherein a death takes a matter of seconds) falsifies the long, lived process that builds and builds towards death in events and decisions and forces in and beyond a person's control. So, then: a thriller, but also a social disease, and the novel wants to have it both ways. Good luck!