All About Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard review – passion in Paris

Two women meet at a dinner party. One is a teacher, the generally sensible mother of a young girl; the other is a flamboyant, beautiful violinist who talks loudly and exudes a captivating spontaneity. The teacher, who narrates the story, falls for Sarah with a consuming, destructive passion. “It’s all about Sarah the impetuous, Sarah the passionate, Sarah the sulphurous.” They are both overcome by their desire, losing their bearings in their lives. And then Sarah is overcome by breast cancer, and the novel begins and ends with them clasped in an embrace in which Sarah may or may not be dead.

This is Pauline Delabroy-Allard’s first novel and it became a massive success when it was published in France last year: titillating with its frank descriptions of sex and erotic paeans to the female body (“her earlobes. Her moles. Her thighs. Her violet vulva”) and captivating with its investigation of the suffering involved in passion. It’s a brief, intense read. There is no world beyond the physiological experiences of the lovers. We see into the narrator’s mind only when she is experiencing the effects of desire, or falling apart in its wake. Other characters – the lovers’ parents, the narrator’s daughter – appear but are not given a chance to exist.

Much about the tone of the novel reminded me of Leïla Slimani’s work. As with Slimani, there’s a combination of breathless excitement and flatness: as though Samuel Richardson has been crossed with Albert Camus. In both cases there is something compulsive about the reading experience, partly just because the feverish rhythms carry us along. Here’s a typical passage:

The passion has already become harmful here. The excitement of burning with desire has become exhausting, so they start to tear each other apart. There’s an arbitrariness in the destructiveness that makes it unconvincing. In the great novels of ill-fated passion – Wuthering Heights or Anna Karenina, say – the story is richly embedded in a social world that makes the lovers feel doomed partly by forces outside their control. Here the two women live ordinary middle-class lives, going to the theatre, taking the narrator’s daughter to school. I couldn’t quite believe in the necessity for them to destroy themselves. Even the breast cancer felt curiously expedient, as though the illness was a necessary consequence of the destruction, rather than a cause of it.

There’s a long, much-contested tradition that associates lesbians with death. Think of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, also set in Paris, where Nora and Robin are caught in a cycle of vampiric love: “We love each other like death.” In Barnes’s novel the doomedness could be associated more easily with outsider status. Delabroy-Allard toys with introducing homophobia, but in general passion – and perhaps especially lesbian passion – is shown as possessing a violence of its own. This leaves Delabroy-Allard reliant on symbolism. Sarah loves playing Schubert string quartets and the narrator becomes terrified by the words of the song that hovers beneath his “Death and the Maiden” quartet.

It could be argued that the arbitrary nature of both passion and destructiveness is precisely what the novel is about. It’s partly an exploration of the solipsism that sex can seem to justify, pushed almost to the point of comedy in a book that still manages to remain humourless. When Sarah is in Japan during an earthquake, the narrator wonders if in fact they are the earthquake, and their relationship is “the seismic shift that made everything judder for several kilometres around”. This is why the breast cancer feels unreal: it may just be another warped consequence of their desire.

The best parts of the book are where the narrator goes deeper into inhabiting her own craziness in Sarah’s absence. She abandons her possibly dead lover and effectively non-existent daughter and goes to Trieste. It’s as though Delabroy-Allard fully accepts here that she has given up on the social novel altogether, and moves instead into a form of travel writing that ends up being more alluring and disturbing than the sex scenes. I found the “glimmering gold, blindingly beautiful” Adriatic the perfect backdrop for the narrator’s decline, if only because the dreamlike setting stopped me minding how wilfully unconvincing the characterisation is beneath the seductive prose.

• Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury). All About Sarah by Pauline Delabroy-Allard, translated by Adriana Hunter, is published by Harvill Secker (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.