THE TRUE TRUE STORY OF RAJA THE GULLIBLE (AND HIS MOTHER)

A gay Beiruti man comes to terms with his mother issues.

Alameddine is gifted at finding the humor in what for most writers would be singularly traumatic themes, including AIDS (Koolaids: The Art of War, 1998), the Lebanese Civil War (An Unnecessary Woman, 2014), and the plight of Middle Eastern migrants (The Wrong End of the Telescope, 2021). Here, he applies his sardonic wit again to the Civil War as well as the calamities of Covid-19, Lebanon’s banking collapse, and the 2020 Beirut port explosion. But before all that, the title characters are bickering. Raja, a respected philosophy teacher with one acclaimed book to his credit, has been living with his elderly mother in a small apartment made even smaller by the presence of more extended relatives. Exasperated with being reduced to his mother’s “homosexual nonbreeding son,” as well as her dangerous involvement in antigovernment protests, he seeks a respite, and one finds him: an all-expenses-paid residency at an institution in the United States. This may be too good to be true (note the title). But before exploring that, Raja relates the story of his two-month captivity at the hands of an acquaintance during the 1975 Civil War. That period includes all the degradations of a kidnapping, but Raja also depicts it as a case of Stockholm Syndrome, with his captor becoming a sexual and emotional confessor. Did the experience inspire his interest in cross-dressing and philosophy? It’s an open question, but it seems to have given him the kind of sass and self-deprecating humor that complicates his character and enlivens the story. Raja’s fatalism is well honed by his period of torment, but also by the everyday annoyances of his family. On both levels, it’s a peculiar but lively and humane book.

A sharp exploration of resilience in dark times.