The request to sit in on a store
reading group could not have landed at a better time of week. The book:
An Unnecessary Woman by
Rabih Alameddine, a book I'd been handsold by a customer.
An Unnecessary Woman is the story of a few weeks in the life of Aaliya, a 72 year old
former bookseller and divorced, childless woman living on her own in an apartment in Beirut. Her relationships are scattered and mostly in the past. Her family has spent the last 50 years trying to get her to move out of her apartment. The novel opens with Aaliya a bit tipsy on red wine realizing that she's dyed her hair blue.
Aaliya is a reader. She's the kind of reader who understands that the life of a book is limited to the access readers have to it. Every year (sometimes every other depending on the year before) she translates a book from English & French into Arabic. She chooses carefully in an inner monologue that I recognize from hours spent lingering over the spines of books waiting to give shape to some future meditations. And she has become almost agoraphobic over the years. A person not much given to outgoing behavior with no good friend anymore and no job to force her into interaction, she finds the proximity of her neighbors (almost all women) physically difficult to bear.
I legit love this book.
The day before we were to meet to discuss the book, one of my co-workers asked me how I feel about books where 'nothing happens.' I asked him to define 'nothing' in a narrative sense because I quite like reading huge hunks of writing that are not filled with Action!, Intensity!, and Plot! He agreed and we chatted in a work appropriate and disjointed (on account of work) way for the rest of the afternoon about the nature of narrative and building situation, etc.
I take this as the Goddess reading over my shoulder, on account of this is a book in which very little happens for a very long time. At least not in the sense of Action. From my perspective as a reader, everything is happening. I am engrossed, engaged and reaching out to Aaliya as she is retreating into her world, her apartment, her memories and her confusions.
Rereading the book was astounding. I had remembered Beirut as the framework of her life, but I had not remembered
how alive and astonishing her relationship to the city is. Her physical experience of
walking around it with memories living in an on every block and sidewalk section is overwhelming, to the point that my physical discomfort began to mimic hers. Happily, my experience of being moved by this book is one that was shared by the members of the book group.
They echoed the idea that even with nothing happening, there is so much going on that they really had a hard time putting the book down. We talked about her mother, about Hannah, about her loneliness and the books. We talked about the power of memory. We talked about how much we all loved Aaliya. We talked about how much we loved this book.
And then this happened: Every one of them. Every. Single. One. of Them. shared how surprised they were to learn that this book was
written by a man. I got to the end of the book before I knew. I was not the only one. The astonishment we felt is not new. More to the point, the disappointment that is on the surface of how not well most men write women was gone, and that was new. It is disturbing to feel relief at a woman written as a whole character, a recognizable person, by a man.
That Aaliya faced other people's expectations of her with no intent to fulfill them. That she continued to live and to feel love for so very few. That she lived through five decades of verbal abuse from her family at her front door. That she remained essentially her own person, self aware and humorous in the face of life offering her the one narrative gift she thought she could well do without (worth it). All of these specific personality traits are generally not found in the person of one woman when that woman is written by men. So it is always strange and almost unrecognizable when it does happen.
If, as
Virginia Woolf asserts "the fact that some of the most famous heroines even of the nineteenth-century fiction represent what
men desire in women, but not necessarily what
women are in themselves" is true even in the twenty-first century, and I believe that it is, then the women in this novel are more than necessary - they may be a signal.
