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A review by korrick
The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine
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.