Book review: An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine's beautiful new novel is ostensibly about an elderly woman living alone in her Beirut apartment. Once married but quickly divorced, Aaliya appears to be, as the title says, "an unnecessary woman".
by Rabih Alameddine
Grove Press
4 stars
Hector Tobar
Rabih Alameddine's beautiful new novel is ostensibly about an elderly woman living alone in her Beirut apartment. Once married but quickly divorced, Aaliya appears to be, as the title says, "an unnecessary woman".
But Aaliya's solitude is filled with incident and wonder. She lives in a city whose name is synonymous with conflict and disorder. In Beirut it's perfectly normal for a spinster to don a pink tracksuit and pick up an AK-47 in defence of her abode.
The wonder in An Unnecessary Woman comes courtesy of Aaliya's voracious reading habits. The imagined worlds of writers as diverse as W.G. Sebald, Marcel Proust and Roberto Bolano are Aaliya's companions. She translates their books into Arabic, filling her home with three dozen translations - which no one else has ever read.
"I imagine looking at this room through a stranger's eyes," Aaliya says of her apartment. "Books everywhere, stacks and stacks, shelves and bookcases, stacks atop each shelf, I in the creaky chair … I have been its only occupant."
After the battles are over, Aaliya keeps a war "relic" on her desk: a copy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, its cover scorched in the lower right corner. "I was reading the book by candlelight while people killed each other outside my window," Aaliya says. "I had an incendiary mishap, something that seems to have happened regularly to Joseph Conrad - the incendiary mishaps, not the burning cities."