The Occasional Virgin

May 15, 2018
Novelist and memoirist al-Shaykh (One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling, 2013, etc.) delivers an elegant story of a friendship that is anything but easy.Huda and Yvonne are both Lebanese with long memories of civil war and oppression but with little else in common: Huda is Muslim, Yvonne Christian; Yvonne is a touch flighty, Huda steadfast. And, as the opening scene reveals, though born beside the sea and now vacationing with her friend on the Riviera, Huda finds the sea depressing, still puzzled by a fatwa on the part of her cleric father commanding that a woman "go with your sisters or female relatives to the sea and expose yourself to the powerful waves and the spray so that they enter you, like a lawful husband entering you...." Yvonne, conversely, likes nothing better than diving from high rocks, daringly, with as little clothing as possible. The two are different in love as well, though, as the story winds its way across space and time, they wind up sharing a man who is working his way through a strange fatwa of his own. There are profound differences between Hisham, a Sunni Muslim, and Huda, a Shia, and of course between him and Yvonne, as if to emphasize how complex but also unexpected, and resolutely modern, so much of Middle Eastern mores can be. Huda, who lives in Canada but has gone to London to work on a theatrical production, turns out to be the strongest of the three principal characters, despite her shyness. Al-Shaykh's novel is full of quiet regrets as it speaks gracefully to the challenges of friendship, challenges that threaten to drive the two women apart but that, in the end, instead strengthen their bond.Another winning book by one of the most distinguished Arabic-language writers at work today.

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May 21, 2018
Irony and iconoclasm are the orders of the day in al-Shaykh’s bittersweet tale of friendship and disillusionment. Both Huda, raised Muslim, and Yvonne, a Christian, consider themselves fortunate to have escaped their native Lebanon’s rigid patriarchy and conservative religiosity. During the country’s civil war, each was sent away to the West—and chose never to return. Years later, both women are professionally successful but personally unfulfilled. Huda is plagued by self-doubt and Yvonne is desperate to have a child. Following a weekend getaway to the Italian Riviera that only serves to dredge up painful childhood memories for both women, they reunite in London, where Huda is directing a play. After a series of tense altercations with religious extremists, the two women embark on a revenge plot against a man who denounces Huda for being an imperfect Muslim. This plan quickly backfires—or does it? Dialogue is at times stilted and laden with exposition or doing some heavy ideological lifting for the benefit of Western readers. But al-Shaykh (The Story of Zahra), who has drawn both admiration and condemnation in her native Lebanon for frank depictions of women’s sexuality and criticism of women’s powerlessness in traditional social structures, continues to grapple with these issues in ways both farcical and profound. It’s the small moments—of both absurdity and genuine pathos—that will remain with readers, as Yvonne and Huda struggle to reconcile where they came from with who they’ve become.

June 1, 2018
Both born in Beirut, thirtysomethings Huda and Yvonne meet at a conference featuring successful Lebanese women, and friendship blossoms. Huda is a theater director in Toronto, and Yvonne runs an advertising agency in London. A vacation together on the Italian coast prompts Huda to grapple with her inability to swim, a remnant of her pious Muslim family's refusal to let her learn as a child. Yvonne, meanwhile, has long drawn energy from the sea. She grew up in a Christian family with a mother who favored her brothers. The two women reflect on the lives they left behind in Lebanon as they explore Italy and, a few months later, reunite in London, each continuing to seek out a hoped-for future. Al-Shaykh's prose invites readers into the vivid imagery of the friends' minds as they grapple with religion, family, relationships, and their own identities; both are complex, fully realized characters. Al-Shaykh's first novel to be translated into English is a refreshing, thought-provoking look at the weight of history on the lives we build for ourselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2018

Lebanese-born, Cairo-educated, and London-based, al-Shaykh writes piercingly about Middle East upheaval and especially women in the Arab-Muslim world. Somewhere along the French Riviera, two young women from Beirut--Muslim-raised Huda and Christian-raised Yvonne--reflect on their tumultuous lives and struggles with work and love.

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