An Unnecessary Woman is a kind of commonplace book, stuffed with citations from Aaliya’s favorite novels and poems. Everything that happens to her provokes a literary reminiscence... Her passion for translation is the prime source of the novel’s claim on its readers’ sympathies. The loneliness of this passion — and therefore the strength of our sympathies — is heightened by the idea, which Alameddine insists on, that Aaliya is pursuing her vocation in a cultural desert ... The story is told from a single point of view and, aside from a few flashbacks, it proceeds in straightforward fashion ... Here is moral capitulation, erotic pleasure, vanity, and surprising tenderness — fiction that matches the complexity of history. All the rest is literature.
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 ... Much of An Unnecessary Woman reads in this fashion, with Aaliya dialoguing with the lives and works of great writers while simultaneously recounting the events of her life, from girlhood to sunset years ...an allegory about how notions of beauty and civilization can endure in a world that periodically descends into barbarism and how women can persevere in a society that never ceases to devalue them in both war and peace ... an utterly unique love poem to the book and to the tenacity of the feminine spirit. And it's a triumph for Alameddine, who has created a book worthy of sitting on a shelf next to the great works whose beauty and power his novel celebrates.
Alameddine’s erudite narrator, Aaliya Saleh, enfolds her personal story within the 20th-century history of her beloved Beirut, battered by decades of war. She sings the glories of literature and scorns the stupidities of human beings. She critiques the sexism of Arab society and is no less scathing about the smug ignorance of Americans ...much of the wonderful humor in An Unnecessary Woman comes from her pithy contempt for those who fail to live up to its sacred precepts ... Her marvelous descriptions of Beirut, where a circuitous old street 'wiggles its hips quite a bit,' contain a note of wistfulness over the way she stands apart from the crowd ...her interior journey is all the plot this novel really needs. It throbs with energy because her memories are so vivid and her voice so vital ... Alameddine has given us a marvelously cranky heroine, gruffly vulnerable and engagingly self-mocking.
It's a portrait of an isolated woman with a dazzling mind as she comes to grips with getting old ... Her life is pretty bare, mostly about books: reading constantly, then, once a year, translating a favorite volume into Arabic ... And that is pretty much the entire novel's plot ... Aaliya is thoughtful, she's complex, she's humorous and critical ... Aaliya's also devoted to Beirut, its gossip and turmoil. She makes the reader want to love her city, too, even while relating what it was like to live through years of fear and violence ...An Unnecessary Woman is about nothing at all — and, at the same time, about everything that counts.
Like Emily Dickinson, Aaliya spends her days alone, writing, in Rabih Alameddine’s contemplative, elegantly constructed new novel, An Unnecessary Woman ...it would be deceptive to say nothing happens in An Unnecessary Woman. Alameddine fits an entire, richly lived life into that day – finding room for war, tragedy, AK-47s, and lots of literature ... Aaliya is a formidable character ... When An Unnecessary Woman offers her what she regards as the corniest of conceits – a redemption arc – it’s a delight to see her take it.
...has conjured a beguiling narrator in his engaging novel, a woman who is, like her city, hard to read, hard to take, hard to know and, ultimately, passionately complex. If Aaliya is a good guide, Beirut also might be savagely funny and entirely unsentimental ...it is the apartment building, the up-and-down of it, that provides a modern theater in which the narrator's tumbling thoughts, jostling memories and quiet actions play out ... In her cranky, wise company, the spellbound reader gradually comes to understand the glories of literary exploration...and also, painfully, it can build an oppressive separateness ... A Beiruti, we realize, must cultivate a certain blindness to walk among the treeless, concrete sprawl and stare down the ghostly visions of former splendor.
An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine’s newest novel, is about a woman who reads. But – in the daringly transgressive prose that characterizes all of Alameddine’s work – it’s about much more than that. It is about a woman who herself is read and misread, who becomes a kind of continually evolving text ... Yes, she is a prodigious reader and translator. But to use postmodernist terminology, Sohbi is not so much an individual but a 'site' simultaneously occupied by those whose work she reads... Emptied of identity – an unnecessary woman – she is made essential by the texts she has literally incorporated into herself ... Those looking for linearity and plot in Alameddine’s works will be frustrated. An Unnecessary Woman is fundamentally a meditation on being and literature, written by someone with a passionate love of language and the power of words to compose interior worlds.
The 72-year-old narrator of Rabih Alameddine's restlessly intelligent An Unnecessary Woman has the complete works of Nabokov, Rilke, Donne and many others on file in the card catalog that is her mind ...what makes An Unnecessary Woman such a convincing tale is his ability to ground the novel's heroine in a set of real-world concerns and resentments ...Alameddine does his most nuanced writing in sections that chronicle Aaliya's important — and invariably doomed — relationships ... Her most formative bond, however, was with a woman named Hannah ...Alameddine makes clear early on in the novel that the relationship is headed for a painful end, theirs is nonetheless a tender and exquisitely rendered love story ...novel full of elegant, poetic sentences, this might be the most wonderful of the bunch.
Family and society define Aaliya, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel, An Unnecessary Woman, as useless and an 'unnecessary appendage' ... The book spans three days of this unique, strange, invisible life Aaliya has constructed so carefully and desperately, compelling readers to see where it takes her ...is about listening to a voice — Aaliya’s — not cantering through a plot, although powerful events do occur, both in the present and in memory ... Aaliya’s voice, however, is pure — she comes to us untranslated, unfiltered. That doesn’t mean she’s entirely reliable, even though her vulnerability and candor make her fundamentally trustworthy ...is not a game, though; it is a grave, powerful book. It is the hour-by-hour study of a woman who is struggling for dignity with every breath.
It is a book in which almost nothing happens – an episode in which Aaliya, the protagonist, washes her mother’s feet is one of the most dramatic – and in which conversation is largely remembered or overheard. Rather, the novel overflows with the interior dialogue between Aaliya and her literary life, the sprawling erudition of her 72 years of reading... Alameddine’s novel is a hymn to an important type of excess – that of art and philosophy – that our ever more efficient and supposedly rational era is quick to discard ...prickly and proud as she is, will find herself reduced to a kind of nakedness before the novel is done. The surprise is that in her case, it proves a state of grace ... Alameddine’s narrative is digressive, at times didactic, unapologetically mandarin, written in resistance to almost all the current norms of a 'well?made' novel...a genuine literary pleasure: a complicated one.
This book has a similarly artificial-seeming setup: Aaliya is an aging woman who for decades has begun the year translating one of her favorite books into Arabic ... until its climax, there’s little action in the course of the day in which the novel is set, Aaliya is an engagingly headstrong protagonist, and the book is rich with her memories and observations ... Her relatively static existence is enlivened by her no-nonsense attitude, particularly when it comes to contemporary literature ...Alameddine finds a way to give the novel a climax without feeling contrived ...Alameddine’s storytelling is rich with a bookish humor that’s accessible without being condescending ... A gemlike and surprisingly lively study of an interior life.
