Reminder: Rabih Alameddine reads An Unnecessary Woman at Booksmith ... @ Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:30pm - 9pm (Queer Things)

more details » Rabih Alameddine reads An Unnecessary Woman at Booksmith on Haight Books Inc, 1644 Haight St.San Francisco, California 94117-2816 http://www.booksmith.com/event/rabih-alameddine-unnecessary-woman Rabih Alameddine’s internationally bestselling novel The Hakawati established him as one of the Middle East’s most celebrated voices, hailed as “absolutely original” (The Washington Post) and a “wonder of a book” (The New York Times Book Review). His latest novel, AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN, is a love letter to literature and its power to define who we are. The prodigiously gifted Alameddine has delivered a nuanced rendering of one woman’s life in the Middle East. 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, we 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. "An Unnecessary Woman dramatizes a wonderful mind at play. The mind belongs to the protagonist, and it is filled with intelligence, sharpness and strange memories and regrets. But, as in the work of Calvino and Borges, the mind is also that of the writer, the arch-creator. His tone is ironic and knowing; he is fascinated by the relationship between life and books. He is a great phrase-maker and a brilliant writer of sentences. And over all this fiercely original act of creation is the sky of Beirut throwing down a light which is both comic and tragic, alert to its own history and to its mythology, guarding over human frailty and the idea of the written word with love and wit and understanding and a rare sort of wisdom." -- Colm Tóibín "With An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine has accomplished something astonishing: a novel that is at once expansive and intimate, quiet and full of feeling. Aaliya is one of the more memorable characters in contemporary fiction, and every page of this extraordinary novel demands to be savored and re-read." -- -Daniel Alarcón Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Hakawati, I, The Divine, Koolaids, and the short story collection, The Perv. He divides his time between Beirut and San Francisco and was a 2002 Guggenheim Fellow. When Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:30pm – 9pm Pacific Time Calendar Queer Things Who • Larry-bob Roberts - creator

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