"What happened to your manners?” “They aged,” Fadia says. “They grew old to keep me young.”
The last couple of years have been pretty crap in many ways, but in them, I have also discovered Rabih Alameddine, which is no insignificant compensation. An Unnecessary Woman, finished on NYE, might just be my best read of the year.
All of those books of his I have read celebrate the act of storytelling in some way - An Unnecessary Woman celebrates literature - the French and English canon, as well as Russians, Czechs, Germans, Americans, Australians (Malouf takes a bow), South Africans and on. Aaliyah, our grumpy and very human protagonist, finds solace and refuge in literature - a characteristic no reader could not identify with: "Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg burst into such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine."
This creates Aaliyah as a knowing guide - one who tackles the reader in intimate ways: " I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like “Books are the air I breathe,” or, worse, “Life is meaningless without literature,” all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children’s picture book."
Alameddine introduces us to Aaliyah as her emotional walls are crumbling, despite her attempts to wall them with literature and isolation. She has accidentally dyed her hair blue, an act which seemingly becomes the final straw in her ability to keep her world intact. Just as the reader is escaping into her world, she too is trying to keep that world alive. Aaliya's literary taste is not always mine (She loves Patrick White and Coetzee!) but her relationship to Anna Karenina hit very close to home. It's not really relevant though - it is not the specifics of Aaliyah's opinions that create the bond with the reader, but her relationship to reading itself.
This intimacy also creates empathy. Aaliyah is a grumpy sod, someone who peers tentatively at her own life lest her sense of loss overwhelm her, and in the process perhaps misses her own value and contribution. There is little she hates so much as an epiphany in a book, and yet, we know she is likely to get one despite herself. It's all very meta, but in a close, not distant way. Aaliyah's struggles become ours, and her catharsis provides some relief to the reader as well.
As if this tender, intimate exploration and how to balance our literary and real worlds wasn't enough, the book is peppered with fabulous bon mots - "
She was so desperate for each of them to have a better life that she raised them not to have a place for her in it." … "She was a one-handed gesticulating fury on the go." … "She [a depressed friend] may have found the lost divine light, but I thought a medical doctor would see to it that she had a flashlight handy." … "I resist the urge to go Merkel to her Bush."
A great way to finish a year that gave us a new, for me currently unread, Alameddine novel to look forward to.