Reviews

Een overbodige vrouw by Rabih Alameddine

verimythe's review against another edition

emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

pondalond's review against another edition

hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

brisingr's review against another edition

4.0

About time to write this review. I wanted to just drop this task, just not write a review at all, but in the end I want to share what I thought with the world.

I never actually know how to take this type of books: somewhat simple, painful because of the realism laced in the story, where you can always find pieces of you. Although not at all similar plot-wise, this book gave me the same vibe as Stoner, for example.

Aaliya is now an old woman. She had her share of tumultuous experiences in her life, and every year she translates one of her favorites books in arabian. No one has ever read any of her translations, she keeps them away, and sees in the simple action of translating, her means of going through life.

I’ll be sitting at my desk and suddenly I don’t wish my life to be any different. I am where I need to be. My heart distends with delight. I feel sacred.

This book was extremely, painfully sad. Too real, it brings up a universal truth: humans are creatures who, for most time, are (or feel) alone. It's a book about loneliess, even a wanted and accepted one, but it's still there. Aaliya most beloved companions are her books and in her truth there's the rebellion of the thinking one. Most of the things she had to say also fitted with what I'm thinking, and I usually don't like saying this (because it might seem fake). But if I am to become a less cooler of her in the future, I am not sure I mind it that hard.

I also felt a pinch of pride at two mentions of Cioran, romanians that reach the international space are extremely rare, and when used not as an exotic location, but as a place with real, valuable people, I love both my country and the writer/the book even more.

I connected a lot with Aaliya, even though I still have a long way to go to reach her level of love and devotion for books. I actually liked all the other characters as well, very human and natural, realistically painted souls that inhabit the most welcoming city of them all.

I feel like one can learn so much from this book, a part of Aaliya's knowledge being passed over to the reader in her contemplations. Her way of seeing life, in the situation of living a solitary life for most of her time on Earth, is very black and white, good and bad mingling only in the picture of her beloved city. And despite the depressing tones of the book, the ending is hopeful and it brings so much light to the situation! Like in real life, sun comes after the rain.

I don't know what to say about this book. If you love books and you have a deep-connection to the paper-world, then this is probably your book.

((now excuse me as I listen to sad music, reread my highlighted quotes and start having an existential crisis))

sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

5.0

“I’m not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry, or more sensuous for that matter.”

When little Aaliya’s mother discovered that her daughter had lost her purse, she predicted in a Delphi moment that Aaliya will never make a lady. Aaliya hadn’t lost the purse, she had exchanged it for an illustrated copy of 'A Tale of Two Cities'.

A reader

"I am a reader. Yes, I am a reader with nagging back pain."

Being taken out of school at age of fifteen and divorced after four years, she found what should have looked like a dream job as keeper of a book shop – after two prettier women quit the job for sake of better opportunities (husbands). She worked there until she retired – often getting herself books on-the-house – without permission of the owner of the house. Now to many, it might seem as immoral, but she had a merge salary and in a way she provided meaning to the shop (opened by owner in vanity rather than for survival), for first time in recent history, books of world literature entered Beruit, and when it comes to stealing books and illegal brewing, I rather prefer the phrase ‘morally flexible’.

She ended up becoming a complete book addict. A lot like someone you could expect to meet on Goodreads - I bet you will love listening to her book anecdotes ("I’ve read Waiting for Godot three times and I still can’t tell you what it is about.”), she has books lying all around in her room, has a book with her wherever she goes, can’t think or talk without quoting one author or other, makes use of a healthy amount of irony and sarcasm and knows more about book characters than real life people. The celebrities whose lives she is interested in are authors and she has a religious obsession for some authors (Fernando Pessoa) and pet peeves for others (Hemingway).

A rebel

May be one way of looking at her is as a rebel – an ex-Muslim atheist woman, with what are supposed to be unfeminine hair (shorter than shoulder length) living alone in Beruit and working alone in a book shop. But what was the point of rebellion? What did it gave to society? Nothing. She has no plans to improve the world around her (she can’t) and, like one of those Camus’ protagonists, she refuses to take sides in wars – equally critical of all sides. But the fact that she survived with her habbit in such hostile circumstances is rebelation enough.

“'I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.'”
- George Carlin

Act of self-preservation

Perhaps she reads not so much to revolt but to escape, an act of self-preservation (”I’m still more or less sane because of my evening reading.”). The city of Beirut has long adopted itself to the oscillations between wars and cease-fires and deaths that war brings – thinking of them no more than one would think about a change in weather and road accidents. At times water supplies could be gone for the days and places would be invaded by bandits. In such circumstances, she finds herself an escape in books.

May be the reasons why she reads so much are the very things she claims to hate in books – books provide a random world some kind of order and thus gives its readers a hope for a moment of epiphany. What she said of writing can easily be said of reading:

“To write is to know that you are not at home.”

Reading is a solitary activity. And mind you, solitary, not lonely, rather it cures loneliness:

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
—Marianne Moore, from the essay “If I Were Sixteen Today"(one of epigraphs of novel)

... And that is true. Despite her solitary life, there is no sign of her feeling alone – she was lonelier in her married years (“I wish I’d listened to Chekhov, or had read him then: “If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”)

Side-effects

Is she a better person because of her reading? She is more assertive of her rights and wishes. Except for that, the impact of her reading this much is more visible in side-effects attached to the habit. We already mentioned back-pain. Spectacles? Sure. She is no longer comfortable among people, becoming useless to society. She has next to no-dressing sense. She won’t eat meat and switched to vegetarian diets to save money for books. In short she became a lot like that girl from Sarah Andersen’s cartoons.



Perhaps this is the biggest problem with reading. If reading was only a desperate effort to create an illusion of something more home-like, than some people end up preferring this illusion over reality:

“I loved the idea of homeland but not the actual return to one.”

literaryjunarin's review against another edition

emotional sad medium-paced

4.0

Bittersweet. It's like listening to a grandmother talk and talk about her life while but for some reason you dont get tired of it.

kmrose's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This is written in stream of consciousness and I had a hard time getting into it, but once I did I enjoyed it!

accorintijeanette's review against another edition

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.75

faloneran's review against another edition

emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

margardenlady's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Aaliyah is our protagonist and we witness much of her life, told in fits and starts with inserting of many, many quotes and references to classical authors and their works. Alameddine is a truly well read scholar and a talented writer. He weaves characters and quotations and titles and writers in and out of Aaliyah's story.  I feel like I only caught a small percentage of the references, but what I did catch enhanced his prose. 

novabird's review against another edition

4.0

Alameddine uses an edgy almost cruel voice, gentled by brief yet deeply compassionate offerings, nuanced by everyday intimacies in, “An Unnecessary Woman,” and combined this delivers a complex and realistic tone. With truth, it lances, bleeds beauty and cleanses the wounds of reality.

Here are some examples of cruelty and beauty of Alameddine’s writing:

My mother was the young United Nations: leave your home, your brothers have suffered, you have other places you can go to, they don’t, get out.

During the war in Beirut, the powerful had money, but those with true power had water.

We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

I prefer slow conversations where words are counted like pearls, conversation with many pauses, pauses replacing words

In front of a building grows – no, not grows, stands – a hewn, rusty-hued bush of undecipherable leaves of which only a few remain greenish.

None of us know how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

The One God is a Nazi.

During these moments, I am healed of all wounds.

Israeli’s are Jews without humour.

Hannah wrote that her new sister-in-law “couldn’t understand stillness” – quite a wonderful phrase, if you ask me.

The ticktock tattooing of the march of time.

The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down.

Flashing a light on a dark corner can start a fire that scorches everything in its wake, including your own ever-so flammable soul.

The sun falls, as does the rain; winter nights arrive without warning.

Indoor winter winds interrogate my ankles.

My soul is fate’s chew toy.

This novel is grounded in landscape of the exterior of Beirut and in the interior of Aaliya. The former is marked by the physicality of reminders, which bring history to light. The latter is marked by a naturalistic narrative intrusion that says, “And where were we again, oh yes. ..” It is like reading a book while traveling that is so engrossing that the scenes that you are passing by become the images instantly imprinted on the page you are reading.

At first I was skeptical that Alameddine could carry a story told in part in the first person pov of a woman. He accomplishes this through his use of realism in his depiction of Aaliya that also disproves the adage

Spoiler

that old people can’t learn new things.

In doing so, he hurdles across two social conventions at once; gender and age with uncommon deftness.

Having read only a few of the books mentioned throughout the novel, I didn’t feel as though I lost out on any essential quality of the story. Instead I found a story in which I could involve myself. I readily recommend this to those who do not consider themselves full-fledged bibliophiles.