THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE, vintage Alameddine prose, story...what better way to start your week?

THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Congratulations to Author Alameddine! THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE took home the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction! See the announcement here!

A LIT HUB FAVORITE BOOK OF 2021!

A BOOKRIOT BEST BOOK OF 2021!

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: By National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman’s journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.

Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

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

My Review: When you are faced with an overwhelming event...say, the Syrian refugee crisis of 2016...which is, in itself, the result of a series of overwhelming events outside the control of any individual who is suffering the consequences of others' bad decisions...where do you even begin to process the emotional and psychic overwhelm of the event?

In Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope, you begin by finding the voice you need to make alienation, victimization, and the abjection of fleeing everything you've ever known against your will, truly personal. Enter Mina Simpson. She is a trans woman in a lesbian relationship (one thing I found ever-so-slightly on the nose was setting a lesbian's tale on Lesbos...but that's where it happened in reality) with a Haitian psychologist, and fellow Chicagoan, Francine. She is a physician summoned to help with the overwhelming floods of refugees from Syria's dissolution by her friend and fellow transwoman (but heterosexual), Emma. Also a doctor, Emma cries for help that Mina arrives to offer exactly as the Holidays result in a vast sea of wealthy-Westerner disaster tourists showing up to "do their bit" to help...Them.

Mina's life as a trans person in Lebanon was harrowing, as I expect most trans people's live are everywhere. There is so much hate directed at trans people all over the world, from every imaginable quarter, that it was a genuine pleasure to see Mina's older brother and sole remaining family member was loving, accepting, and even if not capable of going against the Will of the Family in public, honestly supportive of Mina as her real self. What it has done *for* her, however, is made her adept at navigating the undercurrents of family life. Mina's actions relating to Sumaiya, one of "Them" and possessor of a powerful will in a dying body, prove that Mina is a woman of the most beautifully tender spirit, capable of understanding that love for another can not conquer all and does not confer metaphysical or physical superpowers...but does summon forth reserves of strength that inspire awe in her, and in me.

The story isn't always obvious. I mean by that the presence of the author, Alameddine, on the page is second-person and the main character, our narrator, is addressing him. (He includes a very amusing, exaggerated self-caricature at 12% in the Kindle file that does not give him near enough credit for being so delightful a persona.) The pattern of addressing "you" in MSS is one I am generally not in favor of...I've gotten out of bed, dressed myself, and driven to a charity-box run by people I dislike to deposit a book told in second person so I wouldn't ever run across it again...but done as Author Alameddine does it here, makes me feel included, a part of a larger story. That alone would merit all five stars!

There are many other reasons I loved this read as immoderately as I did. The Lesbian setting makes the fact that this refugee crisis isn't the first in the area, bringing up events that not that many of his readers will know about like the Anatolian expulsion of the millennia-old Greek population and the tragedy of Smyrna, both in 1922 at the birth of modern Turkey. The 2016 refugee crisis, likewise a manufactured event meant to hurt vulnerable people, and similarly is still ramifying through European society (goddesses please bless the departed Chancellor Merkel for her willingness to commit to rehoming a million Syrians in Germany, however self-serving it was in light of their collapsed birth rate), though not always to Europe's credit, is powerfully involving. But they did *something* and we, in the USA, did bugger-all. Like we're doing for the Afghans we abandoned. Like we did for the Kurds we abandoned.

But I digress. And disagreeably.

Author Alameddine's Lebanese queerness allowed him to be Mina in more ways than another writer could. This results in a series of beautiful insights:

...the aforementioned Mediterranean, yes, glorious. Or was this the Aegean, which Aegeus threw himself into when he thought his son Theseus had failed against the Minotaur? The clouds were such that both the asphalt and the water had the same color, a bluish slate, the color of oxidization on copper with a tinge of periwinkle violet.

Tinges of violet...the Minotaur, who ate both boys and girls equally, whose one weakness the ineffable Theseus found by penetrating his labyrinth...the despair of a rigid father setting his son a path in life and imagining that, despite the boy's strength and his quick wits, that he has failed to achieve the father's goals for him...the clouds of obfuscation, the sense of the Present being a fog-bank and only the keenest senses can suss out the proper course (whether it be towards or away from some obstacle). And more, given that this is a moment that Mina's just arrived and is in her car, trying to navigate while overwhelmed by the vastness of clouds obscuring her path to be of service...I could go on, but why? You'll read it, you'll find your own reasons to love the words on these pages.

Mina's marriage to Francine, which she dates to thirty years before the book's events...January 9, 1986, to be precise...began when, as Mina says, she saw Francine "...{dancing} as if she was exploring her body in space." Anyone, anyone who could inspire such a sentence is a worthy object of love as well as partner in commitment! And to make Mina, the awkward and the marginal, the object of reciprocal love and attention, was a stroke of genius. How many of us have the experience of marrying in accordance with Iris Murdoch's deathless marriage (and writing) aperçu: "One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

Possibly the wickedest moment of the book is the ending, where the story of how the story came to be told is told at last: The question posed by psychiatrist Francine to the writer (whose "...default state of being" is whining), in her comfortable Chicago apartment:

"Have you considered writing about an American couple in suburbia to help the Syrian refugees? If you did a good job, Syrian refugees would be able to inhabit the skin of Americans, walk in their Cole Haans, empathize with their boredom and angst."

And this, more than anything else Author Alameddine wrote in this beautiful work, stopped me in my tracks. Like the people in the scene, I bolted upright. Isn't this what we who read voraciously have always claimed Literature does? Allows its devotees to live a million lives, not just focus on one (probably tedious and humdrum) little existence? I like to think it can, and does, and clearly so does Author Alameddine.

But I caution the gentleman against pursuing the Frankenstein retelling he posits...Ahmed Saadawi already staked that corner out, don't you know. (That whole scene of writerly angst and desperation was slapstick funny, and made me chortle chuckle and guffaw...thanks!)

What I'm getting at here is a simple thing: I gave this book five stars, and I think it could get the annual nod of "six stars of five," barring something else this amazing coming across my field of vision. That means, in case I'm not quite making myself clear, that I think this book belongs on your shelf, reading device, or library holds list, wherever you triage the must-read-nows of your literary life. It is profound, profoundly beautiful, and fearless in its ambitious scope and craftsmanship.

I wait for this experience every time I open a book. It is a thrill to get it.

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH, Queer Palestinian girl finds out how her world works...then says "BYE NOW"

YOU EXIST TOO MUCH
ZAINA ARAFAT
Catapult
$26.00 hardcover, available now

WINNER OF THE 33rd Lambda Literary Award—BEST BISEXUAL FICTION!

Rating: 6* of five

The Publisher Says: On a hot day in Bethlehem, a twelve-year-old Palestinian American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the United States and the Middle East—from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine—Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings—for love and a place to call home.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The frustrations of being Othered by virtue of being your own self are not fresh ground to till. Eternally fertile ground growing evergreen crops, though not fresh. I read this book twice and that is a rare occurrence for me, at my age and with my TBR approaching mid-four figures. The reason I decided that I needed a second trip through the book was simple: I was so completely shattered by the honest and vulnerable story Author Arafat tells, a story that could with only minor tweaks be my own, that I didn't trust my opinion-forming ability. I was too close, too in the moment, to feel remotely analytical.

Start with the beginning, an anecdote from the US-raised narrator's childhood visit to her "homeland":

It occurred to me in that moment to question why, as a man, his bare legs were somehow less troubling than mine. It was a double standard, a shame I had simply accepted until then. I must've done something wrong. In acquiring my gender, I had become offensive.

As though a young girl's walking apparatus could somehow be unacceptable! "Haram" or "forbidden" the old religious nuts shout at her. Among the many, many reasons I find religions and religious beliefs offensive in the extreme is the insanity of accepting that your being, whatever part of it the religious don't happen to like, is unacceptable, nay offensive, to the god they claim made you. But Author Arafat reclaims the space:

Ambiguity was an unsettling yet exhilarating space.

I don't inhabit an ambiguous space, being bearded and so American in appearance that, in other countries, American tourists glom onto me for help dealing with the foreignness of their presence in wherever. But there's that inner thing, the queerness, that never, ever quite stays unnoticed. And that is probably why Author Arafat notices with such keenness that her ability to get by with chicanery is such excellent camouflage. It becomes an addicition, in fact. It's easy for someone like me, who also had a borderline personality disordered mother, to relate to her need, her survival-level desire, to camouflage, hide, obfuscate, not say the truth:

I could think of nothing more shameful—why was I doing this to her? At the time I thought the same thing: she should have had better. She didn't deserve this at all.
–and–
"I don't care what you choose to do anymore," she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference.

Didn't deserve what, having a queer child? She's the one who's fucked up for making it such a huge stinkin' deal. Mother Abu Sa'ab and her utter inability to see people not herself as real, fully formed human beings with valid needs. Her child's needs are only seen as demands on her, unfair unjust "what did I do to deserve this?!" impositions. Affection is a conditional gift, not a right...not even a privilege. So Laila Abu Sa'ab, beautiful mother of a plain daughter who is awkward, unpolished, generally not like her, sets the stage for innumerable false trails her (always unnamed, this is all first-person present tense narration so she doesn't need to identify herself) child will follow:

I imagined she was judging me in that moment. I'm familiar with that judgment, after years of anorexia. I was past it by then, but still, how could I eat something so unsexy as a cheeseburger in front of the sexiest woman in the universe?
–and–
I was in between post-anorexia plump and all-night double sets, with no snack breaks—what if she didn't like my body? My mother had recently impersonated me, puffing up her cheeks and holding out her arms beyond her stomach like an ape.

Ah, the addict's favorite crutch: "{object} won't love me if..." and then the spiral goes down from there. "My image is only safe when others are at a safe distance!" and the distance, unsurprisingly, never gets smaller so the isolation becomes unbearable and the addiction comes back and "{object} won't love me now!" lather rinse repeat. It's inevitable. A mother without compassion plus a nature unacceptable to her world (the world, if I'm honest) can't be expected to create any other kind of result.

Then her girlfriend, four years of wondering what the hell is going on inside her partner's head, takes advantage of the narrator's absence to do the stupid, unforgivable thing that almost everyone does: She snoops. Reads emails not meant for her eyes. Be careful, partners, about this behavior. If you discover things that hurt you, no one is to blame but you yourself. "It's better to know!" rises the cry...and I say, "you already knew or you wouldn't have snooped." Anna snoops. Anna finds a mountain of lying and cheating. Bad Anna.

The last line was the hardest to read, the one that made my throat burn: "Maybe one day you'll learn you can't treat people with such disregard. Even yourself."

I get why Anna wrote that, I really do, but that's the nastiest and most judgmental formulation of the truth she could've spun up. This is why the snooping behavior is so toxic. The self-righteousness of Being Right is insufferable and makes those addicts to it very unpleasant people. But the hurt Anna caused did catalyze the narrator to go on a search for help:

Google had informed me that a woman named Pia Mellody ... was the foremost expert on love addiction. She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand.

So did I. Not in a good way, either. These sorts of judgmental sunshine-enema-givers make me itch. "Love addiction"? Really. Addicted to the endorphin rush but short on follow-through, in my never-remotely-humble opinion. But off our narrator goes to this summer camp for the love-addicted. And runs smack into her anorexia anxiety:

I was too uncomfortable to eat, especially {burger buns} that looked like the cotton stuffing inside of furniture.

Why I throw the buns away and get real bread to put around my home-brought fast food burgers. This place is a sham, and the food is the first warning. But the twenty-eight days are crucial to getting to grips with the out-of-control anxiety the narrator suffers.

I don't want to spoiler the extremely moving ending. I don't think I can take you any farther into the text without running that risk. Suffice it to say that, for me, the beating heart of the book is anxiety and anger, an intergenerational gift from all the parts of the narrator's past from before she was born:

At the time I didn't realize what it was that separated the two sides of my family: that my paternal cousins did not live in the noisy neighborhood, go to the community pool, and wait to eat hummus sandwishes at home by choice.

What makes people from mismatched backgrounds think their marriages will work? Expectations unmet are more caustic than acid rain and do their damage just as devastatingly but far more quickly. Judgment is *lethal* to marital (any relationship, really) harmony and inevitable between the parties to an up/down marriage. And it is the gift that keeps on giving, passing to children and fucking them up royally. Add to this mental illness on one side, emotional deprivation and class consciousness on the other, and one gets this sad story of a woman facing the world with a raincoat and a butter knife when she needs a scuba suit and a spear-gun.

I was powerfully moved by this read. I identified with this young woman's pathology and her ancestry, although I'm not ethnically Arab or Palestinian or anything else the US looks down on. I totally understand misgendering and omitting details about one's significant others. Being situationally out, being "reserved" (the polite self-lie for "closeted"), being unable to see past the mountain of unworthy feelings that we stand under, behind, below.

She sought healing, our narrator did; I have as well; and I hope anyone who reads this book (I hope there will be many, many of you) can and will seek healing as well.