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lady_chatterly's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
After reading this entire book, I'm still not sure what the title means. Perhaps it means that the more we try to look at something, the more difficult it is to discern. The meaning must embody a feeling of hopelessness, because the end point is that we cannot achieve understanding through writing, though we may hope to. Throughout the book, the narrator, Mina, addresses an unknown "you". In the beginning, we know only that "you" is a writer who felt unequal to the task of penning anything about the experience of helping Syrian refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos and so suggested that Mina do the writing. Mina is a trans woman of Lebanese descent. She has long been estranged from her family and homeland but has a good life in the US as a surgeon with a beautiful, brilliant wife. She comes to help the refugees at the request of her good friend Emma, also trans and a doctor. When Mina arrives, the onslaught of refugees has slowed; perhaps that's why she has so much time to stroll down memory lane. Approximately half the chapters take us back into the past - not only Mina's past but also the past experiences of people she knows. They're all interesting stories - stories of fleeing war-torn countries, of struggling to fit in, either because of your ethnicity (America is rightfully slammed for its hatred of those from the Middle East) or because of your sexuality. The trans angle interested me - not, I hope, from a voyeuristic standpoint but from a desire to understand. Transgenderism is not actually given a lot of weight, which is perhaps the point. We see Mina not as a trans woman but as a fully fleshed-out complex character. Her gender identity becomes unimportant, but her coming to grips with it is related, at least in part. She recalls that everyone knew she was different when she was being raised as a boy. People assumed gayness, but she was never attracted to men, nor was she overly feminine or flamboyant. She was never "girly". She was, somehow, from a young age, a strong woman; and she relates some of the relationships and experiences that helped her to understand that. She doesn't fit into any particular box. Her friends run the gamut of queerness. Her wife Francine pronounces Emma "too hetero" because Emma is always beautifully dressed and made-up and constantly has a new young man in her bed. The writer who Mina is addressing is, we come to find out, sometimes a flamboyant cross-dresser. Rasheed, an Israeli who has also come to the island to help the refugees, is a more understated gay man. But I didn't really feel the need to puzzle them out. I saw only their humanness, their desire to help these people who had left everything behind and risked their lives to start over. So the stories of gender overlap with the stories of suffering. Perhaps the common thread is the feeling of being an outsider. But that is hard to grasp until you look back on the book as a whole. It feels disjointed at times. It's difficult to tell what the main focus of the book is. One main thread is Mina's interactions with a particular Syrian family whose mother arrives on Lesbos with terminal cancer. Another thread is the revealing of how she became friends with "you, the writer" and his struggle to understand why, after years spent interviewing refugees, it was Lesbos that broke him.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content, Terminal illness, and War
Minor: Racism
alyxinthestars's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Cancer
Moderate: Death and Racism
piecesofamber's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Cancer, Death, Terminal illness, Medical content, and Classism
Minor: Animal death, Child death, Homophobia, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Racism, Islamophobia, Grief, Fire/Fire injury, Alcohol, and War