Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones

Abstract

reviews refused to accept any fundamentalist doctrine but would not flee Mali with his paintings and sculptures when he had the opportunity. His art is judged pagan and destroyed. He is taken to meet the new leader, who had been his schoolmate, it turns out, the worst student in the class, but with money to buy all the television stations and newspapers. The false caliph’s name is repeated many times in the novel: “Caliphe Mabu Maba dit Fieffé Ranson Kattar Ibn Ahmad Almorbidonne.” Ironically, the names of the narrator and his father are never given. In an attempt to save his family from a worse fate, the boy allows himself to be recruited into a terrorist group. He dreams of an ideal woman he will meet in paradise, but, against his better judgment, he participates in the killing of all the inhabitants in a village when he, like the believers , is drunk on blood and cocaine. In one village, when all the women and girls are gathered together to be raped, he finds that he cannot touch a child. When he is made a “page” to the caliph, he is forced to give his master drugs and to masturbate him. The final straw comes when the leader decides to divorce the boy’s parents and make his mother marry another fundamentalist man, to which the boy reacts by killing the caliph. The narrative line has been reversed, with references in the first chapter to such events as the killing of the caliph that are only described much later in the novel. The boy and his father walk through the bush. The father knows the land and sees baboons that seem superior to humans, but the son has to teach him to avoid the land mines (“les oeufs de la mort”). The father dies after having reached Bazana, his native village. The effect is one of uncertainty. Although the father dies, what will happen to the young narrator? Will Mali be able to defeat the fundamentalists ? The ending leaves the reader with no resolution. Adele King Paris Elvira Dones. Sworn Virgin. Clarissa Botsford, tr. London / New York. And Other Stories. 2014. isbn 9781908276346 Sworn Virgin, winner of the English PEN Award, highlights the consequences of a little-known cultural practice through the geographical, psychological, and psychosexual journey that reunites the “dry” body and troubled soul of its thirty-fouryear -old Albanian protagonist, Hana/ Mark Doda. Hana arrives at the airport in Washington, DC, soon after 9/11, having spent fourteen years as a “sworn virgin,” a status that arose because the blood feud engendered by Albania’s medieval law code, the kanun, ended the lives of so many males in Albania’s northern highlands . Since only men could head households in this highly patriarchal region, it was sometimes necessary that a woman switch her gender role within the community, assuming male responsibilities and privileges while observing lifelong chastity. The novel comprises seven sections that alternate Hana’s American present—her gradual adjustment to modernity, big-city America, and womanhood—with her Albanian past. Hana shuttles between her university in Tirana, the bustling capital, and her tiny village in the mountains “made of eyes that observe and forbid , . . . made of silence,” until at age twenty she takes “the oath.” By doing so, she avoids becoming “a slave” in an arranged marriage. The narrative unfolds in a present tense laced with flashbacks that fill in her backstory. Dones’s deceptively simple prose—translated from its original Italian, her second language, into a flat English—well suits Hana, who, like her creator, lives distant from her native land and tongue. Seeking fluency in English, frustrated by her awkwardness, Hana periodically cites passages from poetry to express her emotions. If Hana’s voice captures history and place in Albania, where 56 worldliteraturetoday.org Oscar Coop-Phane Zenith Hotel Ros Schwartz, tr. Arcadia Books Oscar Coop-Phane shows he is not afraid to tackle the darker sides of life as he tells the story of a prostitute and the men she serves. The novel unfolds with a sympathetic clarity that refuses to shy away from both the harsh realities of life and the bits of...