THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (and His Mother), as usual a solid, fun, enjoyable Rabih Alameddine read

THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (and His Mother)
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Grove Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$28.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

WINNER of the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: From National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his mother

In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.

When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.

Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One thing the gay youngest child learns early and often: "tag, you're it!" never ends. End-of-life care for difficult parent? "Tag, you're it!" It comes to us all.

And don't our siblings just love it. Our parents, well, it's complicated...and it never really uncomplicates. Raja grows up gay in a country whose religious majority strongly discourage public gayness. That right there's a novel's worth of coming of age, coning out, coming to terms with the world as it is. And what do you know! That IS most of the novel...just not in real time. Raja and Zalfa (his mom) interact as a function of their shared history. (Note to closeted boys: your mother knows. Your dad's more iffy, but your mother knows.) Their zingers and barbs all relate to the devastation of Lebanon, the loss of functioning civil society, and the endlessness of sneaking and hiding that gay lads insist is necessary when it mostly isn't. At home, anyway.

Since Zalfa is such a force of nature and since he's made responsible for her care in his tiny home, Raja thinks running away from that home sounds wonderful. (Never mind it's his own home.) As a novelist manqué, he never expected to get an offer from a writing program for a residency, still less one that will take him to the US...pretty damn far from Beirut. Bliss!

You clever readers! You already know that dodge absolutely never works. What happens in the US is best described as "madcap." If one were to write a gay version of Topper, with a seriously bossy mother in place of wife, and make the ghosts more numerous, it would be this story. (Side note to the Hollywood story editors who haunt my blog (snort): Buy this book! I have some casting ideas, too!)

What caused him to run away is what causes most gay sons to run away. His mother, who loves him and whom he loves, is the emotional center of his world. There is no room to expand, to rummage, to poke into the dark corners and see what's there, at the center of the family circle. Leaving Mother is a rite of passage that never gets skipped in a healthy life. Or even a complicated, eventful, not-always-happy one that only tangentially flirts with mental health.

Author Alameddine is a perennial favorite of mine. We're the same age, we're both literature and book lovers, we've seen a world utterly, completely up stakes and shift away from what we'd thought were Eternal Verities. I feel...at ease...reading his work because I recognize the assumptions, I get the emotional valences, and I like being there. I enjoyed the experience I had coming to the table with Zalfa and Raja, sitting down to listen to their conversation, and learning from each one's actions exactly how much they really love each other.

If I have a cavil with The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), it's that the nature of a novel of the memory, the inevitability of flashback in its use, tends to decrease the impact of the events so recalled. In this story's structure, there are not multiple timelines; there are memories recalled. In both of those use cases, as the timelines are each about Raja and Zalfa, I know for sure that I'm not here to find out what happens but how what happened felt. And feels.

It is a minor thing, but a real one. I'm hearty in my recommendation to get yourself to Beirut via Author Alameddine's memory palace. It is a very nice place to spend a day reading and thinking and laughing.