Book Review: 'Muslim Cleavage'

Cutchogue resident and marketing director Andrea Parks has written a book called "Muslim Cleavage," a story of how love can conquer all even in the setting of the combative Middle East. Parks, who co-wrote the novel under her maiden name, Andi Levin, with Omar Anzur, is also a volunteer firefighter and EMT at the . She is a South African-born Jew with a degree in Organizational Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Contributor reviewed "Muslim Cleavage" for North Fork Patch.

If the recent Middle Eastern uprisings and militant actions taken in Libya are symptoms of a combatively changing world, "Muslim Cleavage," a new novel by Omar Anzur and Andi Levin, sidesteps these overt political motives, allowing the universal story of love to bear itself sans presumption.

The story concerns the arranged meeting of Kamran Noor, an aspiring architect, and Farrah Nawab, a beautiful artist, and the incidental romance of their respective servants, Ejaz and Leila.  What follows are a series of impassioned motives and displacement, as Kamran relocates to London and Farrah to the United States, and their servants’ ability to find time to meet is thwarted, resulting in an intricate web of secretive meetings and insecure misadventures.

Anzur, a Pakistani Muslim and investment banker, and Levin, a South African Jew and marketing director, have not omitted the effects of a cross-cultural war on terrorism, but have transferred its layered importance to a motif for love. The novel’s destined question becomes, then, how is love to exist in a world plagued by war, prejudice, misogynistic rule and tradition? 

The authors’ stylistic retort, it seems, is the inclusion of a multi-perspective narrative reminiscent of Leila Aboulela 2005 novel Minaret, in which each main character relays his or her events and thoughts in an attempt to bring out the idiosyncrasies of these personalities and use them as contrast with one another. 

While the intention is pragmatic, the outcome is sometimes too factually conclusive. In an early chapter, Farrah explains, “Men use countless potions and pills to grow their hair, in fear of it thinning, or worse, balding. In Pakistan, men grow facial hair, yet some, like Kamran, remain clean-shaven. In New York, while women go to great lengths to show off their hair, the women in Pakistan hide it behind a burqa or dupatta.” It is this biographical way of exposition that undermines the emotional potential of the characters, unfortunately echoing the omniscient opening lines of the novel, “Muslim cleavage is when a woman’s bosom is not covered by a dupatta, the long scarf that is essential for modesty to many South Asian women.”            

Tolerating these setbacks, though, one is drawn to the novel’s enormous capacity for detail and cross-cultural influence, especially the idiomatic phrases such as “Talibanized” and “Al-Qaeda-ville” which move across the page so freely, their seriousness is glazed over. This is to say that the authors are in no way concerned with replaying the media’s version of Pakistani and American relations, in which these phrases are nearly taboo, but are compelled to let their own observations take hold of the story. 

There is a wealth of Western influence that pervades Pakistan, and conversely, Farrah’s stay in New York’s East Village is occupied with Starbucks trips and mediations on Western art. Between the references and scenes that zero in on Muslim culture, is the story’s naked metaphor: the unveiling of these Muslim characters’ buried desires by way of explaining the religious demands for concealing clothing. The clothing and physicality of tradition play ample roles and it is the authors’ business to expose these preconceptions about Muslim culture and hint at an omnipresent nature that links people everywhere.   

For more information on the book, go to http://muslimcleavage.com/