Book Review: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Blue hair and two glasses of wine hints at comedy shenanigans and New York style neuroses.  What we get, though, is a cynical and at times heartbreaking novel of a woman, now 72 years old, who lives an almost hermit like existence in an apartment in Beirut.  From a young age Aaliyah fell in love with all things literature, and while this activity wasn’t viewed kindly by her family, she obtained a low paying job at a bookstore near her apartment.  With the store now closed, Aaliyah maintains her sanity by translating novels from great European writers into Arabic.

Like Lila, An Unnecessary Woman shifts without hesitation or warning between Aaliyah’s current situation and her early life in Beirut.  It’s clear from the outset that she’s always been an outsider.  Her love of books and language puts her at odds with a culture that expects woman to marry and bear children at a young age.  Aliyah does marry but her husband, while not abusive, isn’t the most agreeable man and their divorce further isolates Aaliyah from her family and her community.

However, Aaliyah isn’t entirely alone.  Through her ex-husband’s family, she meets Hannah, her “almost sister in law” and only friend.  It’s Hannah who convinces one of her relatives to employ Aaliyah in his bookstore.  And it’s through the bookstore that Aaliyah meets Ahmad, a boy who holds the same fascination for literature that she does.  Unfortunately both relationships end in tragedy.  Hannah commits suicide and Ahmad essentially becomes a torturer for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

As a result of Hannah’s death, coupled with the coming of the Lebanese civil war and constant pressure from her family to leave her relatively large apartment, books become Aaliyah’s

milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like “Books are the air I breathe,” or, worse, “Life is meaningless without literature,” all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book.

Aaliyah’s near religious obsession for the written word allows Alameddine to both celebrate literature (not just the Western cannon) while using it as a metaphor for her isolation.  This is underlined by Aaliyah’s translations of great European novels into Arabic.  What’s striking and key to her state of mind is that at the conclusion of a project she stores the translation away “in a box and the box in the bathroom.”

Aaliyah provides a number of rationalizations as to why her work ends up in the maid’s bathroom.  She argues that to translate a Russian novel, for example, she’s required to rely on English and French translations of the same work.  A copy of a copy is never the same quality.  At a more cynical and bitter level she states that,

My translation activity is useless. Yet I persist. The world goes on whether I do what I do. Whether we find Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase, civilization will march forward and backward, people will trot the globe, wars will rage, lunches will be served. Whether anyone reads Pessoa. None of this art business is of any consequence. It is mere folly.

These observations are as much a commentary on her work as they are on her life as and this bitter sense of fatalism pervades the novel making it difficult to feel any sympathy for Aaliyah. But then she’s not asking for our sympathy.  She’s a 72 year old woman who has spent the last 42 years actively withdrawing from everything around her.

And maybe if Aaliyah lived in America or Australia, she could disappear forever.  But she lives in Beirut a city that’s constantly on the verge of a new Civil War or an incursion from Israel.  And if it’s not Palestinian fighters kicking down her door, it’s her half brother trying to dump Aaliyah’s ailing mother in her apartment.  This all culminates in a devastating moment where a burst water pipe threatens to destroy Aaliyah’s hard work.

Throughout these intrusions, Aaliyah’s finds assistance from an unlikely source, her landlord Fadia and Fadia’s two girlfriends who also live in the apartment block.  This relationship between the four woman, which grows slowly but gradually, thankfully undercuts much of Aaliyah’s bitterness, giving the novel a much needed sense of humour and heart.

I was critical of Marilynne Robinson for not giving her main protagonist, Lila, the opportunity to make a choice – to stay in Gilead or to leave.  Alameddine does not make the same mistake.  In a scene that earns its emotional impact, Aaliyah, as a result of the incident with the water pipe, makes a fundamental decision in how she intends to approach her translations in the future.  In the context of world history and the goings on of everyday life in the city of Beirut, it’s a choice of little consequence.  Mere folly you might say.  And yet for Aaliyah it is the entire world.  It’s an almost sentimental ending to a novel that considers what it truly means to have a meaningful life, to be a necessary person.