Rabih Alameddine's clever, fragmented new novel, 'The Wrong End of the Telescope,' tells the story of a Lebanese doctor treating refugees from Syria.
,” tried on so many rhetorical devices to contemplate faith and death that it felt maddeningly centerless.
Here, though, Alameddine finds a consistent tone. Mina is clear-eyed about the crisis, noting that “European nations were trying to figure how to stop the refugees from entering without appearing monstrous for doing so.” Money, medicine and basic considerations are in short supply. But Mina also has an irreverent streak and dark humor that undercut prejudices against the refugees — or. She laughs at the notion that her writer friend could be a suspected terrorist: “Look at you.
All of which signals that telling this story in a linear way, with well-worn gestures of compassion, would not suffice. Sumaiya is experiencing a crisis atop a crisis, but Alameddine wants to keep medical or political solutions at a distance. Most urgent for the refugee is clinging to her dignity. “She had no control over her life or that of her family,” he writes.
, little boys with machine guns ... everything and everyone had more control over what happened to her. She’d had it. Enough. She wanted autonomy.”So does Mina, amid her shifting identities in relation to home, family and gender. So does her writer friend, gay and a survivor of the AIDS era.
Or, as doctors are trained to think, it does no harm. Blind optimism and pat solutions are for other novels. The prevailing mood here is resignation, but of a gimlet-eyed sort, rooted in an unwillingness to give up entirely. The answer is somewhere, but not exclusively in a book. Toward the end, Mina chastises her writer friend. “When has writing explained anything to you? … Keys, if they even exist, darling, are not found in literature.
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