Book Review - An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

I loved this book. It will stay in my book shelves to be re-read. Rahib Alameddine has penned a masterful novel of an elderly woman in Beirut, Lebanon, who eschews much in life other than her translation of books. Aaliya, seventy-two years old, living alone and dedicating her life to her love of language shares her memories with us. Aaliya, reclusive yet feisty, would not be concerned if we, her readers, disagreed with her opinions of life. Her long relationship with the thirty-seven books she translated, provided her with much wisdom and sardonic humour. She seemed to have accepted, and even appreciated, her estranged relationship with her family, her neighbours and humanity in general, while also feeling uncomfortable with the disconnection as she grew older.

The beginning of the book, Aaliya’s life as she told it, a plodding affair, seemed to have nowhere to go. She described her own aging self in a way that transcended the mores of culture and time. Aaliya remembers life through the war years in Beirut, and purchasing an AK-47 for self protection that she slept with through that time. She has a quasi reconciliation with her mother, deep in dementia, in a tender and lovely memory of washing her mother’s feet with the help of her grandniece. The greatest tragedy for Aaliya though, was the near destruction of her cherished translations, none of them published, merely ‘created and crated’. Damaged plumbing in the apartment upstairs drained down upon the carefully packed books.  The ‘three witches’, as Aaliya called them, who kept a close eye on her, came to her rescue. The book ended on an uplifting note with Aaliya having an ‘epiphany’ about her life’s possiblities.

“I long ago abandoned myself to the blind lust 

for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it 

I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.” 

~ Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

Title:  An Unnecessary Woman 
Author:  Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Grove Press
Distributed by: Publishers Group West
Copyright: 2013
Format:  Soft Cover
ISBN: -13 978-0-8021-2294-0 
eISBN: 978-0-8021-9287-5
Type:  Fiction