eyeglazz: BOOKS

Fantastic read! Great insight into the way the Arab world views sex. A woman recounts her sexual encounters and her philosophy of love in this brief but intense exploration of Arabic desire. Reading like the sort of erotic manuscript the narrator loves to study in secret, this novella presents a view of the world and Arab womanhood very different from the silent, veiled stereotype. Can be a bit emphatic and doctrinal, but is so lyrical and so enthusiastic that one can't help but allow for it's sincerity. I really couldn't put it down. I sat in my cushy bedroom chair after work and didn't move until it was finished. One finds it more difficult after reading this big-hearted novel to believe that "Islam and sex do not mix." Salwa Al Neimi, a Syrian woman who has lived and studied in Paris, tells the story here of a female librarian who becomes a scholar of classical Arabic erotica and then uses it to inspire and enrich her own sexual adventures. The reader, by the way, is never quite sure which of those adventures are real and which imagined. But drawing a distinction when it comes to sex between "the real" and "the imagined" is one of the things this novel challenges: "He was just as my words had shaped him. The image belongs to me; it has nothing to do with him" (p138). No writer I have read blends so successfully sexual frankness, human insight, and poetic delicacy. Moreover this remarkable sensitivity, Al Neimi argues, derives from an extraordinary tradition of Arabic erotica that leads to, rather than away from, that God who both creates and blesses our desires. "The Proof of the Honey" is an important book because it dispels cultural stereotypes while transcending the local to make all of us think more deeply about the realm of the senses. What her lover tells the heroine of this novel is what we might say of its author: "I love two things about you. Your free spirit and your Arabness" (p95). We must not forget that God creates sex which for me is the proof of the honey.