Reading fiction in translation offers us a glimpse into different worlds, cultures that we can never experience ourselves no matter how sophisticated modern travel has become. That’s exactly what Elvira Dones’s Sworn Virgin does, taking us to the mountains of Northern Albania where the clan system is deeply embedded, blood feuds confine families to their houses for decades and, according to traditional law, a woman can become a ‘sworn virgin’, taking the name, dress and persona of a man, providing there are no males of her generation in the family, an honorable choice for a woman left alone in this strictly segregated society. This is what Hana decides to do. Aged nineteen, reluctant to accept an arranged marriage and easy prey for sexual predators, she becomes Mark and remains so until her cousin Lila invites her to join her family in America.
Dones’s intriguing novel opens with Mark sitting on a plane next to Patrick O’Connor. They’ve got to know each other a little over the ten-hour flight and as they make their way to passport control Patrick hands Mark his card then forges ahead leaving Mark to face his first act as a woman for fourteen years, handing over the passport that identifies him as Hana. Welcomed into the warmth of her cousin’s family, Hana feels nervous, unconfident yet anxiously eager to embrace the outside world. Lila and her daughter Jonida are both desperate for Hana to throw aside Mark and create her new identity, plunging into the world of makeup, dresses and facials. Understandably, Hana is reluctant: she must unravel the supreme act of will it took to create Mark, let alone accustom herself to a freedom and culture radically different from life in her tiny mountain village. Even the smallest thing like buying a dictionary is challenging. Slowly, at her own pace, with loving encouragement and cajoling from Lila and Jonida, Hana finds herself a job, an apartment and a car. Her next task is to rid herself of her troublesome virginity.
It’s a fascinating premise for a novel and Dones handles it beautifully. Flashbacks to Hana’s life studying in Tirana where she makes friends and finds someone she thinks may become a lover, and her life as a man in her gender-segregated village are inter-spliced with her new life, struggling to find an identity which will fit her and coming out from underneath Lila’s sometimes suffocating warmth. The relationship between Hana, orphaned when she was ten, her beloved aunt and her uncle, dying from cancer and anxious for her future, are touchingly portrayed. As Hana becomes closer to Jonida the missed chance of motherhood is poignantly clear. Hana’s struggles to rid herself of her virginity are both touching and humorous. Her story is told in simple, direct language making the confusion of her identity all the more effective. In other less-skilled hands this is a story that could have fallen flat on its face but Dones – and her translator Clarissa Botsford – deftly avoid prurient sensationalism. The final sentence makes you want to jump up and cheer.
Lovely pic, look forward to more!
Thank you! Can’t resist marmots even if they are rodents. Flowers and mountains tomorrow.
Laundry mountain, ha! I’m going to remember that for future use.
Definitely prefer the Dolomite mountains!
I can almost smell those meadow flowers! Lovely.
Aren’t they gorgeous! So many of them, too.
You’ve pulled what I call a memory hook because somewhere else in the recent past I’ve heard about women taking the name and persona of a man in similar circumstances but I can’t remember where. It certainly wasn’t to do with this book. This is going to plague me for the rest of the day!
Oh dear! Sorry, Alex. I know that feeling only too well. I like the ‘memory hook’ phrase. Will use that one myself if I may.