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The Sexual Life Of An Islamist In Paris (2010)

by Leila Marouane(Favorite Author)

3.04 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1933372850 (ISBN13: 9781933372853)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Europa Editions

review 1: This book didn't do much for me. And in the end I found myself lost what it actually was all about. So basically this is the story about some turned apostate Muslim in his forties from the Parisian suburbs who has the means to (physically) escape his controlling mother and his pious younger brother by moving to the city and shedding his identity to enjoy the perks of secular society which in this case means first and foremost sex with no strings attached. I guess one of the intention of this piece of prose was to address racism on the one hand and the oppression of women in Islam on the other. No revelations there. Also certainly not a reason to pick this book in particular. And it did not help at all that in the end the whole thing turned out to have been just something l... moreike a dream altogether.
review 2: I got this book for free from the Multnomah County Library stall at Good in the Hood, so I started with understandably low expectations. I was going for some light, and spicy, summer night reading to offset the political economic books I read during the day. The Sexual Life provided just that, and although I found the protagonist's descriptions of women to be blatant objectification, it was obviously a parody. I found the analysis of living as an Algerian Muslim to be very interesting. I wrote my senior thesis on the legacy of French in post-colonial Africa, so I found it interesting to look at the converse situation. (It's important to note though, that there isn't a perfect parallel to French colonists in Algeria and Algerian immigrants to France). The end of this book really threw me for a loop though! The writing becomes extremely surreal, almost a stream of consciousness, and the although Muhammed is supposedly the main character, by the end of The Sexual Life, the novel is told from the perspective of a sinister and unseen protagonist. I really have no idea what the conclusion of The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris is. less

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