An Unnecessary Woman
Rabih Alameddine
[Grove Press]
Early in An Unnecessary Woman, protagonist Aaliya Saleh excoriates contemporary writers for making her ‘feel inadequate because [her] life isn’t as clear and concise as [their] stories’. Rabih Alameddine’s fourth novel accompanies this solitary septuagenarian character through years of accordingly winding, and largely uneventful, memories. Bibliophile and misanthrope in equal measure, Aaliya’s life is modest and repetitive – afternoons at a quiet bookstore, silent mornings in a darkened apartment – and yet, surprisingly, absolutely enthralling. Aaliya may be crotchety, but she’s funny and self-aware, prone to wry jokes and cross-language puns even in the most desperate of situations. Alameddine artfully embeds the routine mundanity of Aaliya’s life in the political and cultural turbulence of Beirut, where the fact that she sleeps with an AK47 is less remarkable than living as an independent divorcée in a society where she can only be, at best, her family’s ‘unnecessary appendage’.
Aaliya uses her difference to feel superior; her name, as she reminds us, means ‘the one on high’. To this end, she perpetually identifies with literary loners – virgins, homosexuals, and unrequited lovers – as intellectually remarkable as they are ostracised. Sex and literature are somehow analogous: both ‘can sneak the other within one’s walls, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again’. Aaliya, then, has effectively replaced human intimacy with reading, and her digressions are punctuated with literary citations and allusions. At times, this makes it difficult to distinguish between the character and Alameddine himself, and Aaliya’s mostly Western literary tastes and her constant disparaging of Lebanese literature and literacy further reduce her credibility as a Beiruti booklover. Nevertheless, it is this dialogue between Aaliya’s reality and the life and work of her idols that lends her story much of its power. Weaving intimacy with the potential universality of literature, Alameddine has crafted a character that we can truly ‘sneak into our walls’: it is ultimately this boring old woman who makes An Unnecessary Woman, a truly captivating read.
Words: Mònica Tomàs
