New Yorker Fiction Review #219: "The Confession" by Leila Slimani

Review of a short story from the Feb. 18 & 25, 2019 issue of The New Yorker...

I read a lot of short stories in The New Yorker and with varying degrees of interest. But few have ever stopped me dead in my tracks like "The Confession" by Leila Slimani. This first-person story is told in the voice of a young, rich Moroccan man confessing to a rape he committed years before in rural Morocco.

Frankly, I don't even want to get into the details of the story. Suffice it to say, it is a stark, tragic reminder of the kind of sexual atrocities that happen to women all over the world, every day. What's even worse is that the story takes it's origin from an actual confession Leila Slimani got wind of through a website that encourages men to come forward and anonymously confess to sex crimes.

One interesting, ironic note in the story is that, early in the story, some young men are joking about a woman who "dishonored her family" by having sex before marriage. And then the main character himself takes a girl's virginity by force, with the gleeful help of his father's servant. The tragic irony is that the same thing will probably be said about the poor peasant girl in the story, whose only "dishonor" consisted of being poor and walking alone on a country road. For, in the world of the story, it is clear that the girl has no rights in this situation and, even were she to report the incident (to whom?), it would likely cause more trouble for her than for the perpetrators.

There is a larger-overarching theme at work about the perpetrator of the crime having to live with the guilt of having committed it. But it's almost an after-thought, despite the story's title. One might have thought Leila Slimani would explore this guilt a bit more, even have the perpetrator experience some justice, in some way. But perhaps that is outside the realm of what she wanted to focus on.