Reviews

Aaliyah is our protagonist and we witness much of her life, told in fits and starts with inserting of many, many quotes and references to classical authors and their works. Alameddine is a truly well read scholar and a talented writer. He weaves characters and quotations and titles and writers in and out of Aaliyah's story. I feel like I only caught a small percentage of the references, but what I did catch enhanced his prose.

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4.0

Alameddine uses an edgy almost cruel voice, gentled by brief yet deeply compassionate offerings, nuanced by everyday intimacies in, “An Unnecessary Woman,” and combined this delivers a complex and realistic tone. With truth, it lances, bleeds beauty and cleanses the wounds of reality.

Here are some examples of cruelty and beauty of Alameddine’s writing:

My mother was the young United Nations: leave your home, your brothers have suffered, you have other places you can go to, they don’t, get out.

During the war in Beirut, the powerful had money, but those with true power had water.

We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversation with many pauses, pauses replacing words

In front of a building grows – no, not grows, stands – a hewn, rusty-hued bush of undecipherable leaves of which only a few remain greenish.

None of us know how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

The One God is a Nazi.

During these moments, I am healed of all wounds.

Israeli’s are Jews without humour.

Hannah wrote that her new sister-in-law “couldn’t understand stillness” – quite a wonderful phrase, if you ask me.

The ticktock tattooing of the march of time.

The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down.

Flashing a light on a dark corner can start a fire that scorches everything in its wake, including your own ever-so flammable soul.

The sun falls, as does the rain; winter nights arrive without warning.

Indoor winter winds interrogate my ankles.

My soul is fate’s chew toy.

This novel is grounded in landscape of the exterior of Beirut and in the interior of Aaliya. The former is marked by the physicality of reminders, which bring history to light. The latter is marked by a naturalistic narrative intrusion that says, “And where were we again, oh yes. ..” It is like reading a book while traveling that is so engrossing that the scenes that you are passing by become the images instantly imprinted on the page you are reading.

At first I was skeptical that Alameddine could carry a story told in part in the first person pov of a woman. He accomplishes this through his use of realism in his depiction of Aaliya that also disproves the adage

Spoiler

that old people can’t learn new things.

In doing so, he hurdles across two social conventions at once; gender and age with uncommon deftness.

Having read only a few of the books mentioned throughout the novel, I didn’t feel as though I lost out on any essential quality of the story. Instead I found a story in which I could involve myself. I readily recommend this to those who do not consider themselves full-fledged bibliophiles.

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Generally enjoyed the book but I think I'd have enjoyed it more if I had a degree in literature. I had to abandon the idea of looking up things I'm unfamiliar with because there were so many novels, novelist, composers, etc mentioned that it would have taken me longer to do that than read the book itself. That came off as pretentious at times but it was fitting of the main character and I enjoyed the story as well as the history woven into it.