The Occasional Virgin, which features two friends who fled the conflict in Lebanon 20 years previously. Huda is a Muslim and lives in Canada; Yvonne, who lives in London, is Christian. Both are independent and successful, but grew up in households weighted in favour of men, with difficult mothers to contend with, and this past comes in flashbacks after they meet for a holiday on the Italian coast. They are also single, and it is clear that they are sexual adventurers on this trip abroad: Yvonne flirts aggressively with an Italian student while Huda goes on a date with a gardener ... The novel shows some early promise – a discussion of their displacement from Lebanon is illuminating, and contrasts are set up between the friends’ faiths - but sadly this is not explored with any degree of depth. Instead, indirect inner monologues create flat and binary characters.
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 ... 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 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.
Al-Shaykh is a Lebanese novelist and short story writer, long resident in London, who writes in Arabic. Because of her years in the U.K. and her frank discussion of sexual matters in fiction often set in Arab countries...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.
Catherine Cobham has ably translated the book from the Arabic, and only the occasional English-ism might distract an American reader … witty, wonderful characters…reveal a great deal about the country they grew up in, and left … Al-Shaykh works a little miracle with her characters and…allows all sides to speak and everyone to hear each other … [a] warm, amusing novel[.]
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 ... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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...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.
