An Unnecessary Woman Discussion Guide: Home
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
-
Escaping BeirutNew York Review of Books, March 25, 2014
-
‘An Unnecessary Woman,’ a piercing study of detachment and devotionThe Washington Post, March 20, 2014
-
Listen: Interview with Rabih AlameddineNPR Books, February 02, 2014
-
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine review – ‘a complicated literary pleasure’The Guardian, March 20, 2014
-
Interview With Rabih Alameddine, 2014 National Book Award Finalist, FictionNational Book Foundation, 2014.
-
Additional Interviews and FeaturesFrom www.rabihalameddine.com, accessed November 11, 2015
Other Works by Rabih Alameddine
-
The Hakawati by
ISBN: 9780307266798
Videos
Discussion Questions
(From the publisher)
1. Aaliya says that her dearest friend Hannah “wrote of her need to be loved, to be desired, as a ravenous monster with an exigent appetite living in a black hole within” (p. 122). The two friends had many similarities (they were both often lonely, they both sought escape in stories, and they both struggled with insomnia), but do they both represent the same kind of person that Fadia describes when she says: “There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don’t” (p. 286)?
2. At one point in An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya finds herself wondering if she’s grown too old for Beirut (p. 90). Could the novel have been set anywhere else other than Beirut? Aaliya says that the city is “too random” and that she doesn’t feel in charge of her life for it (p. 53). How does her excessive reading habit affect Aaliya’s sense of control and order?
3. In Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, the title’s question is posed from a mother to her lesbian daughter. Aaliya, whose family repeatedly insists that she just be “normal,” finds herself in a similar situation (p. 113), seeing as Aaliya is a character who seeks specialness time and time again. In what ways does she do this?
4. Aaliya talks about the psychological nature of some novels that are too concerned with explaining causation, or why characters do the things that they do. She refers to the day that her brother brought her mother to Aaliya’s doorstep: “If this were a novel, you would be able to figure out why my mother screamed” (p. 96). But Aaliya never does learn why her mother screamed. Discuss this bit of meta-commentary on the novel’s psychological function. What do novels that avoid causation narratives accomplish in their place?
5. After Aaliya was engaged to be married and taken out of school, she explains, “My only hope was to fake my way to an education” (p. 209). In what ways did she manage her self-education?
6. When Aaliya’s translation manuscripts are ruined in the apartment flood, how would you describe the responses of Aaliya’s neighbors—the women she refers to as the “witches”? Were you surprised by their responses to her distress? What does this scene at the end of the novel reveal about female friendship?
7. Given that Aaliya is someone who spends most of her time reading fiction—which consists of events that do not happen and characters who do not exist—does that explain why Aaliya believes “no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed” (p. 155)? And is that somehow related to her thought that people aren’t defined by what they do in life, so much as what they do notdo?
8. On page 106, Aaliya confesses what she suspects her readers realized long before: that she’s never actually tried to publish any of her thirty-seven translated manuscripts. When she’s finished translating a book, she sets it aside, and doesn’t show it to anybody: “I create and crate!” Does Aaliya’s anonymity as a translator really makes her an “unnecessary” woman in her eyes? What are some of the other ways that the book suggests that Aaliya could be considered an “unnecessary woman”?
9. Aaliya tells the story of a Polish Gestapo officer who spared artist and writer Bruno Schulz because he decided that Schulz was “no ordinary Jew, but a necessary one” (p. 183). What does the anecdote imply about art’s role during wartime? What does Aaliya believe art is capable of?
10. Two of Aaliya’s favorite books are W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrantsand Ota Pavel’s How I Came to Know Fish. “What I love about them is that they deal with the Holocaust by looking at it indirectly … Both refuse to soil grief with sentimentalism, and so they are devastating” (p. 203). Later, Aaliya worries that she is becoming sentimental in her old age. Do you think that her interior observations throughout the novel err on sentiment? Or are they more defined by other qualities?
11. Aaliya is careful to emphasize how many Jewish artists, writers, and thinkers she enjoys, before she tells her readers, “Like many nation-states, including its sister pygmy state Lebanon, Israel is an abomination” (p. 195). Discuss Aaliya’s stance on the state of Israel, as a woman who has lived her entire life in Lebanon over a period of time in which both countries have seen war.
12. Aaliya has an active, nearly irrepressible sense of humor. Can you cite specific instances? Is her humor something that was supposed to distinguish her from her ill-fated friend Hannah?
13. What roles did Ahmad play in Aaliya’s life? Why does he leave the bookstore and Beirut? Compare and contrast him to the other male characters in the story, such as Aaliya’s “impotent insect” of a husband, Aaliya’s half brother, or Hannah’s lieutenant.
14. All of Aaliya’s thirty-seven translations have been works already translated from their original languages—she only does “translations of translations.” But at the end of the novel, Aaliya decides she’s ready to undertake her own translations of books initially written in French or English. What does this change say about Aaliya? At the end of the novel, she’s trying to decide between one novel written in English, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and the FrenchMemoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Which do you think she will choose? What will her choice between the two books mean?
15. “Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan” (p. 117). What books have given you that shot of joy, a sensuous pleasure you can taste?
16. Aaliya notes at a few different instances in the novel that she avoids stories that culminate in an epiphany. “There should be a new literary resolution: no more epiphanies. Enough. Have pity on readers who reach the end of a real-life conflict in confusion and don’t experience a false sense of temporary enlightenment.” (p. 148). Does An Unnecessary Woman end with an epiphany?
Reserve a copy
-
An Unnecessary Woman by
ISBN: 9780802122148 -
An Unnecessary Woman (CD)ISBN: 9781491507391
Suggestions for further reading
-
The Accident by
ISBN: 9780802129956From Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare comes a dizzying psychological thriller of twisted passions, dual identities, and political subterfuge. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of the war in the Balkans, The Accident closely documents an affair between two young lovers. On a rainy morning in Vienna, a taxi pulls onto the autobahn only to crash into the median barrier moments later, hurling its two passengers--a man and a woman--from the backseat as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; he only says that the mysterious couple seemed to be about to kiss. As the investigation into their deaths deepens, a lonely researcher will uncover a mutually destructive relationship that blurs the line between fact and fiction, fear and desire, and love and fixation over the course of twelve years. An alluring mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality, The Accident is a fever dream of a novel that marks a bold and fascinating departure from Kadare’s previous work. -
A Girl Made of Dust by
ISBN: 9780802118950Publication Date: 2009-07-08In her peaceful town outside Beirut, Ruba is slowly awakening to the shifting contours within her household: hardly speaking and refusing to work, her father has withdrawn from his family; her once-youthful mother looks so sad that Ruba imagines her heart has withered like a fig in the heat; and Ruba’s brother is secretly meeting with older boys, some of whom carry guns. When Ruba decides that to salvage her family she must first save her father, she uncovers a secret from his past that will propel her into a brutal reality where men kill in the name of faith and race, past wrongs remain unforgiven, and where only courageous acts of self-sacrifice and unity can offer survival. As Israeli troops invade Beirut, Ruba realizes that she alone may not be able to keep her loved ones safe, and it is up to her father to shed the shackles of his past and lead his family to a better future. A Girl Made of Dust is a coming-of-age story sparked, but not consumed, by violence and loss. This poetic debut captures both a country and a childhood plagued by a conflict that even at its most threatening, carries the promise of healing and retribution. -
The English Patient by
ISBN: 9780679416784At the end of World War II, the lives of four people--a young American nurse, her dying English patient, a handless American thief, and an Indian soldier in the British army--intertwine in a deserted Italian villa. -
Memoirs of Hadrian by
ISBN: 0374529264Publication Date: 2005-05-18Both an exploration of character and a reflection on the meaning of history, Memoirs of Hadrian has received international acclaim since its first publication in France in 1951. In it, Marguerite Yourcenar reimagines the Emperor Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his gradual reordering of a war-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant and precise as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own era. -
Waiting for the Barbarians by
ISBN: 9780140061109For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. -
Remembering the Bones by
ISBN: 9780871139771Publication Date: 2007-12-21"Itani’s writing is merely breathtaking.” -- Newsday The new novel from the award-winning author of Deafening is a poignant exploration of one eighty-year-old life, as its heroine lies at the bottom of a ravine where she has crashed en route to visit the queen. Born the same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of ninety-nine privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an eightieth birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that Georgie drives off the road, her car plunging into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car and unable to move, she must rely on her no-nonsense wit, her full store of family memories, and a recitation of the bones in her body--a childhood exercise that reminds her she is still alive. As Georgina lies helpless, she reflects on her role as a daughter, mother, sister, wife, and widow--on lost loves and painful secrets--offering a whimsical and profound insight into the life of one ordinary woman who, while drawing on her instincts to survive, asks herself: what has it all amounted to? -
Final Exam by
ISBN: 9780307263537A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition.