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korrick's review
4.0
4.5/5
We live in an age where to be born on certain sides of certain borders is a criminal sentence. Born in the wrong zip code, born in the wrong country turned fascist in reaction to disaster capitalism, born in the wrong body in the land of the free so long as you contort yourself along the shifting sands of the 'male' and the 'female', the never feel and the all feel. To read literature written in English is to view the world from one of those Powers that Be that have shaped these colonial garrotings in one way or another for the last half a millennium, so to get even the half measure of any and all of these is to discover a grain in the desert of a grain of sand. And then, to find a tale that doesn't offer any easy answers, but feels real and honest and sick to death of certain bodies/cultures/languages only being allowed to exist if they're deemed 'marketable' enough by those who deem it their god-given right to market others. It's not the cut and dried revolution sold to many a teen reader, or the post-apocalypse sold to many a disillusioned middle-ager, or even the status quo titillation that keeps seniors too scared to venture beyond their Occidental-stronghold of a sidewalk-less neighborhood just in case they run into someone who isn't white. Instead, it's the tale of a handful of people crossing certain borders and finding love on the other side of them, but also learning to recognize that, the fact that they were not punished for their efforts doesn't mean that they should have been forced to do so in the first place, whether through fleeing civil war or escaping bigotry or inhabiting other forms of, lucky enough to move into survival, unlucky enough to perish if stopped. It's a tale of community that is stronger for its differences, but only after doing the hard work of earning one another's trust in the constantly evolving fashion of a true partnership, not just slapping the band aid of a religious (aka convert or starve) organization or a marginalized bilingual or some other non-equitable form of 'diversity' onto the platform and putting a fresh one on whenever the old one burns out. If this were your conventional tale, some all consuming disaster would throw the efforts of all the characters out the window, and suddenly everyone would revert to the first-world sanctioned practices of worshipping at the altars of capitalism/Moloch because, after all, throwing the less fortunate under the bus in the most legal/cost-effective manner will always be the only way of 'getting ahead.' As it is not, I'm rather surprised the average rating is as high it is. Then again, the kind of reader likely to read this may just be as tired of all the previously described as I am. Perhaps they, too, seek signs of a better tomorrow, where money is a quaint nonentity and you are judged not on how well you don't rock the boat at your stage of the pyramid, but how willing you are to communicate and then help; in other words, put the person before the profit, something my country would rather destroy itself than do.
I've spending chunks of my time today perusing various social medias and blocking fearmongers who would be terrorists if there was any way they could lazily get away with it. Their main weapon of choice? The conflation between certain character traits and being a predator, sometimes of the larceny or power-grabbing kind but more often than not zeroing in the sexual in reference to some sacrosanct of the week, which in a neo-puritan homeland like mine will always be a molotov thrown on a gas leak. In terms of the sacrosanct, we have the virginal WASP woman, the (white) children, and in this book, we have the 2015-2016 mass sexual assaults of women in Germany. To this day, folks are arguing in the Wikipedia talk section about whether the article for the incident needs to be more or less specific in regards to the projected non-white ethnicities of the attackers, and all I can think about is how this wielding of racialized hysteria will forever play out so long as economics is predicated on white men 'saving' white women from Black/brown men. As for the rest of us, I think about unions, mutual aid groups, global communities, and what it would mean to truly work for the freedom of all, rather than the individual freedom to possibly attain the state of being able to acquire anything one wants for a price. Perhaps then we wouldn't be so prone to be divided and conquered by the inevitable consequences of the world being sold to the highest bidder. Perhaps then we could have life alongside of death in all their natural resolutions and beautiful transformations, instead of constant shock and awe that alienates folks from their needs and leaves them ripe to be preyed upon by the panopticon. Perhaps, then, we would notice when we were being sunken into hatred, and have the communal means to turn towards the light instead.
Insanity is the insistence on meaning.This work is a heartbeat away from getting five stars from me. That heartbeat is part of what I am trying to puzzle through through writing this review. It's certainly easy to pick out the positives: a masterfully queer holism, an achingly relevant plotline, the fact that, if you zero in on the English portions of the script covering my edition's front cover, you can just pick out 'no borders, no nations' written over and over and over again. It wasn't as if this was in any way a comfortable read, but to read it was a comfort, in that it was taking 21st century realities and transforming them into literature without hiding behind convoluted emptiness or playing up oppressive grotesqueries as so many pieces tend to do these days. The tongue-in-cheek advice said to the authorial self-insert may have something to do with it (I'll leave it to you to discover what exactly this 'voyeur within a voyeur within a voyeur' metatextual tool consists of), as while there was much unknown for me to gratefully sink my brain in as small reprieve from my home country's cultural hegemony, there was no real moment where I felt myself drowned and raised back from the dead. Still, this was a wildly more successful read than my six-years-ago introduction to this author could've made me assume, and I'm glad that, upon reading the summary, my soul seized the lapels of my brain and didn't let go till I had the book in my hands.
We live in an age where to be born on certain sides of certain borders is a criminal sentence. Born in the wrong zip code, born in the wrong country turned fascist in reaction to disaster capitalism, born in the wrong body in the land of the free so long as you contort yourself along the shifting sands of the 'male' and the 'female', the never feel and the all feel. To read literature written in English is to view the world from one of those Powers that Be that have shaped these colonial garrotings in one way or another for the last half a millennium, so to get even the half measure of any and all of these is to discover a grain in the desert of a grain of sand. And then, to find a tale that doesn't offer any easy answers, but feels real and honest and sick to death of certain bodies/cultures/languages only being allowed to exist if they're deemed 'marketable' enough by those who deem it their god-given right to market others. It's not the cut and dried revolution sold to many a teen reader, or the post-apocalypse sold to many a disillusioned middle-ager, or even the status quo titillation that keeps seniors too scared to venture beyond their Occidental-stronghold of a sidewalk-less neighborhood just in case they run into someone who isn't white. Instead, it's the tale of a handful of people crossing certain borders and finding love on the other side of them, but also learning to recognize that, the fact that they were not punished for their efforts doesn't mean that they should have been forced to do so in the first place, whether through fleeing civil war or escaping bigotry or inhabiting other forms of, lucky enough to move into survival, unlucky enough to perish if stopped. It's a tale of community that is stronger for its differences, but only after doing the hard work of earning one another's trust in the constantly evolving fashion of a true partnership, not just slapping the band aid of a religious (aka convert or starve) organization or a marginalized bilingual or some other non-equitable form of 'diversity' onto the platform and putting a fresh one on whenever the old one burns out. If this were your conventional tale, some all consuming disaster would throw the efforts of all the characters out the window, and suddenly everyone would revert to the first-world sanctioned practices of worshipping at the altars of capitalism/Moloch because, after all, throwing the less fortunate under the bus in the most legal/cost-effective manner will always be the only way of 'getting ahead.' As it is not, I'm rather surprised the average rating is as high it is. Then again, the kind of reader likely to read this may just be as tired of all the previously described as I am. Perhaps they, too, seek signs of a better tomorrow, where money is a quaint nonentity and you are judged not on how well you don't rock the boat at your stage of the pyramid, but how willing you are to communicate and then help; in other words, put the person before the profit, something my country would rather destroy itself than do.
I've spending chunks of my time today perusing various social medias and blocking fearmongers who would be terrorists if there was any way they could lazily get away with it. Their main weapon of choice? The conflation between certain character traits and being a predator, sometimes of the larceny or power-grabbing kind but more often than not zeroing in the sexual in reference to some sacrosanct of the week, which in a neo-puritan homeland like mine will always be a molotov thrown on a gas leak. In terms of the sacrosanct, we have the virginal WASP woman, the (white) children, and in this book, we have the 2015-2016 mass sexual assaults of women in Germany. To this day, folks are arguing in the Wikipedia talk section about whether the article for the incident needs to be more or less specific in regards to the projected non-white ethnicities of the attackers, and all I can think about is how this wielding of racialized hysteria will forever play out so long as economics is predicated on white men 'saving' white women from Black/brown men. As for the rest of us, I think about unions, mutual aid groups, global communities, and what it would mean to truly work for the freedom of all, rather than the individual freedom to possibly attain the state of being able to acquire anything one wants for a price. Perhaps then we wouldn't be so prone to be divided and conquered by the inevitable consequences of the world being sold to the highest bidder. Perhaps then we could have life alongside of death in all their natural resolutions and beautiful transformations, instead of constant shock and awe that alienates folks from their needs and leaves them ripe to be preyed upon by the panopticon. Perhaps, then, we would notice when we were being sunken into hatred, and have the communal means to turn towards the light instead.
I lost everything a long time ago, and I will outlive them all.I don't think I ever really figured out where that final star ended up going. May need to read more Alameddine to discover that.
ahamiltonrohe's review against another edition
4.0
I have so many thoughts about this book and I’m not sure I can eloquently state them. Number one: it is fluid, natural and a strong story amidst so many current affairs issues — a trans woman, immigrants, refugees, being gay or trans in an Arab country, euthanasia…it’s impossible to talk about this book without including all those issues — and yet, it is as simple as this: it is a strong, beautifully written, human story.
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
ginkgotree's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this. Rabih Alameddine's writing is beautiful, simple, and engaging, and Mina is a wonderful character. Highly recommend.
peajaypee's review against another edition
4.0
The structure and movement of this novel was unusual and I enjoyed that, not least because Alameddine's interview on the "Between the Covers" podcast provided some insight into the choices he made, especially finding the narrative distance (not too enmeshed, not too detached) and the influence of the poet Fernando Pessoa (and his many heteronyms). I loved getting to know the narrator, especially when her brother was with her, and it left me wanting to know the author character (a sort-of stand-in for Alameddine himself) so much more.
whodeylisa's review
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
ameliasbooks's review against another edition
I will come back to this another time. The book and I, we are just not matching right now. Maybe I expected to be drawn into this book the same way as I was with An Unnecessary Woman and that didn't happen. But this is a very different story, so I will come back to it when the time feels right.
whatismichaelareading's review
Structure/narrative writing style simply didn’t work for me