An Unnecessary Woman

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Alameddine, Rabih	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024

"Aaliya Sohbi 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. After overhearing her neighbors, 'the three witches,' discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya accidentally dyes her hair too blue. In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman's late-life crisis, readers 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" -- from publisher's web site.

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Life, Literature and a Labyrinthine Story submitted by sVfGI7Glt2pz7GZgVB90 on July 14, 2020, 11:06am This is the kind of book you know you'll love and you wait until the right time to read it It’s about an elderly divorced woman in Beirut who spends her time translating books into Arabic that she then puts away and never shares. It’s about books and solitude and ageing and translation and war and so on.

Rabih Alameddine's last novel.

An Unnecessary Book...? submitted by bookher on June 14, 2022, 3:51pm I so wanted to love this book but after forcing myself through 1/3 of it, I gave up. I felt like nothing happened in this book. Where was the story. I really loved the protagonist but I kept waiting for the real story to start and it never did.