Sex, Lies, and Strawberries: On Hanan al-Shaykh’s ‘The Occasional Virgin’
Dig deep enough into frivolity, and you just might strike substance. Sound far-fetched? Well, it is. After all, if we’re talking about books, most of the time you’ll come up empty-handed; what appears frivolous at first blush tends to be precisely that upon closer inspection. But with a combination of inexhaustible patience, superior burrowing technique, and plain old-fashioned luck, chances are that one day you’ll end up with one that fits the bill. As it happens, The Occasional Virgin, by Hanan al-Shaykh, is that book—this reviewer did the requisite digging for you—or at least one of the precious few in circulation.
Al-Shaykh is a Lebanese novelist and short story writer, long resident in London, who writes in Arabic. (That said, her recent One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling was written in English.) Because of her years in the U.K. and her frank discussion of sexual matters in fiction often set in Arab countries—see, for example, The Story of Zahra and Women of Sand and Myrrh—al-Shaykh has had to contend with charges that she has divorced herself from the Arab world she continues to mine for stories and that her depiction of Arab women smacks of Orientalism. Such overblown accusations need not detain us here. In fact, an intriguing (and counterintuitive) aspect of The Occasional Virgin is that al-Shaykh has dulled the edge of much of her original Arabic-language material. This process appears to have begun with the book’s very title.
is not a straightforward translation of an original Arabic-language work and the outwardly silly novel , which feature the same pair of protagonists. Al-Shaykh merged the two stories, reworking, excising, and adding much material. The resulting text was then rendered into fluid and natural-sounding English by , who is not only a veteran translator but head of the Department of Arabic and Persian at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
