The Wrong End of the Telescope

If you read the review about that engaging lady Aailya, the septuagenarian from Beirut who sleeps with an AK-47 and isn’t afraid to use it, you might ask why I spent $27USD to buy another book written by the irascible Alameddine. Simple. Because he doesn’t give a flip what we think, as pointed out, and that makes for a completely unfiltered, reader-be-damned, electric story. And, I had hoped this one would be different. Let’s call it a learning experience. From the book’s jacket, this is what I expected: “… a transporting novel about an Arab American trans woman’s personal journey among Syrian refugees on a Greek Island.” As advertised, Dr. Mina is an American trans woman who travels to a Greek Island to help a friend process Syrian refugees. We learn about her, her struggles, compassion, heartache, the pain she suffered when expressing her identify as a child and at the loss of her father, and the role her brother and wife have played in her life. And all this was done with extraordinarily beautiful prose as one would expect from Alameddine. The book opens with a lovely thought in Dr. Mina’s point of view as she arrives in Lesbos. As paragraph one comes to a close, a warning shot is fire—in case you are the easily offended type, it gives you a chance to jump ship. Unfiltered. Remember? In full disclosure, I’m not a fan of that sentence, but free speech and all. Plus, we know he has a thing about sex and religion. Good thing I pressed on. Otherwise, I would have missed the scene with the book revolving on the luggage carousel. It’s funny, but I guess you had to be there. The chapter changes, and… Dr. Mina is talking to someone who doesn’t seem to be in the car with her. I kid you not, I thought about the movie when the boy with the sad and frightened doe-like eyes says, “I see dead people.” Anyway, she’s telling him that he made her write this story because he couldn’t, because he’s large like Whitman. Wait. What? I’m confused, I’ll admit it. Are we taking Walt Whitman? I thought Whitman could write. Am I the only one who’s confused here? She’s alone again, driving a stick-shift Opel, heading to her hotel. She’s reflecting on what appears to be a strained relationship with her wife. It’s touching, lending clarity to statements in the last chapter about writing making sense of the senseless and healing wounds. When she arrives, she finds there are more volunteers than are needed but eventually becomes involved in one family’s story. We get to know the advertised Dr. Mina, but it seems the Syrian refugee crisis becomes a prop for her story and that of a certain writer-proxy. In another review, I suggested that Alameddine intrudes in his stories that are supposed to be about other, albeit envisioned, people. Since he has been honest that he writes for himself and that he is his ideal reader, we should expect it, and that’s okay. Some readers might find that distracting, others hand out awards. It takes a village. With An Unnecessary Woman, arguments could be made that I was wrong about the alleged intrusion. To that, I will say that being wrong is what we humans do well, and I can do some things well occasionally. I understand that connections are made between the lived experiences of the envisioned Dr. Mina, which Alameddine shares, and that of the refugees. But does the author/author proxy’s lived experiences need so much real estate in this book? In a story about a tragic humanitarian crisis, I simply cannot understand why it needed more than the wonderfully rendered Dr. Mina, who served as a compelling proxy for Alameddine and others. And the real estate—this is the strange part—are pages of Dr. Mina telling this author/author proxy about what he did and thought in the past, which begs the question: why is she telling the author/author proxy what he did and thought in the past when this man already knows what he did and thought in the past? I don’t know. But it yanks us away from the plight of the refugees and into more of his take on philosophy and mythology, and, you guessed it, his reading list.