Before a calculatedly smudged bathroom mirror, Aaliya cautions: “I begin this tale with a badly lit reflection.” Reader be warned, but also be captivated: What follows is the abstruse self-portrait of a thoroughly beguiling misanthrope who suffers from her own failing health, insomnia, and, although she will not admit it, loneliness. Alemeddine's novel is a portrait of an isolated woman with a dazzling mind as she has no choice but to face aging alone. And alone in her apartment in Beirut, Aaliya is surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is the depiction of what it means to be an unnecessary woman – the books takes its title from the narrator's sense that she is de trop – unwanted, and unwelcomed.…show more content… Knowing only Arabic, French and English, Aaliya produces translations of translations through a somewhat tortured system of her own design – an extra layer of derivation that naturally is not lost on her. And although over fifty years she has translated thirty-seven beloved books, her works have never been published or read by anyone. Aaliya tells us: “I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox... If literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass – and hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me.” Each manuscript, once completed, is exiled into boxes in the empty rooms and bathrooms of her apartment. Aaliya's life's work is uncommunicated, unknown, invisible – much in the way that Aaliya is, herself. She is keenly aware of this obscurity, and Alemeddine writes of how alone she is, “how utterly inconsequential my life has become, how sad.” Aaliya manifests the displeasure of the unnecessary. Absorbing the creative spirit of the great writers she admires allows Aaliya to live without feeling like a tragic figure. Alemeddine's protagonist is a thinker and a lover of art, and of ideas – and of
