The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a novel as expansive, funny, and poignant as its title promises. With his signature wit and irreverence, Rabih Alameddine (The Angel of History; The Wrong End of the Telescope; An Unnecessary Woman) charts decades of Beiruti history and trauma through the life of his narrator, Raja, a reclusive, aging teacher of French philosophy.
The novel opens and closes in 2023, when Raja shares his apartment with his overbearing but deeply endearing mother, Zalfa. The bulk of its sections jump back in time: to the pre-civil-war 1960s, Lebanon's civil war in 1975, the banking collapse and Covid-19 epidemic, and Raja's ill-fated trip to the United States for an artists' residency in Virginia. (He should have more fully recognized how suspicious the invitation was: he had written a book 25 years earlier, but "I'm not a writer, not really. I wrote a book, that was it. It was an accident.") Writer or no, Raja is a knowing, purposeful narrator, teasing his reader with what is to come, defending his story's chronological shifts: "A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it's true. Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks...." Self-aware and self-deprecating, Raja names himself the Gullible, the Imbecile, the Neurotic Clown, the Dimwit. His mother is "Raja the Gullible's Tormentor." "Deciphering [her] was a feat that would have surely flummoxed Hercules--my mother as the unthinkably impossible thirteenth task." They bicker constantly, foul-mouthed but fiercely loving.
In past timelines, the reader learns of Raja's troubled childhood as a gay younger son, bullied by much of his family, especially Aunt Yasmine, "the wickedest witch of the Middle East." During the civil war, in his teens, he is held captive for weeks by a schoolmate and soldier with whom he begins a sexual relationship that is part experimentation, part Stockholm syndrome. He describes his accidental path to teaching, 36 years of it; he refers to his students as his "brats," but his care for them and, even more, theirs for him will become gradually apparent. Amid terrible events, like the port explosion of 2020, Raja's mother befriends a neighborhood crime boss named Madame Taweel: "Only my mother would find a mentor at eighty-two, let alone the most inappropriate one." Bawdy, rude, and impossibly sweet, with "a laugh so delightful, so impetuous, so luminous," Raja's mother is the indomitable star of this loving, heartwrenching novel. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: An especially wry, wise, comic style distinguishes this unforgettable tale of national trauma, community, familial love, and forgiveness.