Leila Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris

Mohamed Ben Mokhtar—or, as he has somewhat absurdly Gallicized himself, Basile Tocquard—is a Muslim bachelor fleeing the constraints of family for sex and freedom. Once (perhaps) a believer, he now intends to live a debauched life, writing poetry and sleeping with as many women as possible. But when Ben Mokhtar finally escapes his mother’s clutches, he does not find himself pursuing the snow-white Frenchwomen he desires. Instead, he’s mired in the stories of Algerian women: the prudish student of astrophysics, the promiscuous filmmaker, the pregnant lawyer.

And yet, it is uncertain if these women exist beyond the confines of Ben Mokhtar’s literary ­imagination. The months after he leaves his mother pass in a ­spiraling, pill-fueled dream. Is the liberated Ben Mokhtar/­Tocquard finding himself? Or is he creating himself from the books of Loubna Minbar, a fictional Algerian novelist who “steals people’s lives”? The Sexual Life of an ­Islamist in Paris, ­although seemingly told by Ben Mokhtar, never belongs to him. We are regularly reminded that he is not the true narrator: While the rest of the text is in the first person, some variation of “he said” is appended to the first sentence of each chapter. The identity of the shadow ­narrator is almost certainly Loubna Minbar, who is almost certainly based on (strongly feminist, also persecuted) Leïla Marouane herself.

The shadow narrator’s portrait of Ben Mokhtar is rarely sympathetic. While we’re told that he’s highly educated, both in secular and in Muslim institutions, he is neither a clever talker nor a persuasive Islamist. His extreme anxieties do make him, at times, sympathetic. But his grasp of ­women’s minds and of his religion is almost absurdly simplistic: he believes, no matter the evidence, that females gaily spread their legs in response to wealth, and he cannot keep straight even the most basic tenets of ­Islam. If this were a book about just Ben Mokhtar, the narrative scorn would be unbearable. However, the story is never really about our protagonist, but rather about how he is created. How much of Ben Mokhtar is “real” and how much is a political or orientalized fabrication? Is Ben Mokhtar his own ­caricature, the culture’s, Minbar’s, our own? In a mid-book epigraph, the fictional Minbar is quoted as saying: “No books are committed without a motive.” The shadow narrator’s motive—whether to reveal a certain truth, to support her views, to achieve fame or ­money—is left to the...