One of the Middle East's most celebrated voices, Rabih Alameddine
follows his international bestseller, The Hakawati, with an enchanting
story of a book-loving, obsessive, seventy-two-year-old "unnecessary"
woman.
Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by
stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced,
Aaliya is her family's "unnecessary appendage." Every year, she
translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The
thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have
never been read--by anyone.
In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman's late-life crisis,
listeners follow Aaliya's digressive mind as it ricochets across visions
of past and present Beirut. Colorful musings on literature, philosophy,
and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya's
own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and
spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable
disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.
A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the
prodigiously gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of
one woman's life in the Middle East.
