An Unnecessary Woman Author: Rabih Alameddine | Language: English | ISBN:
B00ET7PJL0 | Format: EPUB
An Unnecessary Woman Description
One of the Middle East’s most celebrated voices, Rabih Alameddine follows his international bestseller, The Hakawati, with an enchanting story of a book-loving, obsessive, seventy-two-year-old “unnecessary” woman.
Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s “unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read—by anyone.
In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman’s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Colorful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.
A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the prodigiously gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of one woman's life in the Middle East.
- File Size: 1101 KB
- Print Length: 306 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0802122140
- Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (February 4, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ET7PJL0
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,650 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman is a rare book indeed. This is the first time I recall reading an intelligent story about an older woman - completely about an older woman and no other characters - since Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent. The brilliant Alameddine has managed to beautifully capture the innermost thoughts of a complex, intelligent, lonely, and independent Beiruti woman in her early 70s – that’s something you don’t come across every day! Aaliya is not an incidental mother or wife, some ancillary character supporting male counterparts that could be removed from the story with little consequence – no, she is the heart, soul and troubled psyche of this intensely thoughtful, quietly moving book. Alameddine does an amazing job of empathizing with Aaliya and making her situation, her thoughts and experiences, real. A largely self-educated woman of high intelligence - an anomaly in Beirut society due to her independence and intellect - she is an observer, an inward thinker, a fly on the wall that bears witness to Beirut’s chaotic history over 50 years in her spacious, book-filled apartment. An outcast to her family and society at large, she skirts the expectations of others and manages to live her life as she wants, taking on long-term literary translation projects for her own pleasure, aloofly eavesdropping on her gossiping neighbors, and observing her beloved city from the shadows. The city of Beirut and its inhabitants also figure largely in the story. In many ways it is a love letter to Beirut, with all its flaws and conflict, danger and beauty.
Aaliya, as her name implies, is indeed "above it all;" she views her role in life as that of a casual spectator of events, both large and small.
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