The Wrong End of the Telescope
家族、記憶、アイデンティティを巡る長篇。移民としての経験や言葉の不確かさをユーモアと哀愁を交えて描き、個人史と歴史的文脈が交差する中で自己と他者の関係を問い直す。
作品情報
家族、記憶、アイデンティティを巡る長篇。移民としての経験や言葉の不確かさをユーモ…
家族、記憶、アイデンティティを巡る長篇。移民としての経験や言葉の不確かさをユーモアと哀愁を交えて描き、個人史と歴史的文脈が交差する中で自己と他者の関係を問い直す。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Grove Press
- 発売日
- 2021-09-21
- ページ数
- 368ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 14.61 x 3.18 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780802157805
- ISBN-10
- 0802157807
- 価格
- 6258 JPY
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Coming of Age
WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award winner for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) and National Book Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.
RABIH ALAMEDDINE is the author of the National Book Award-winning The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) , as well as the novels An Unnecessary Woman ; I, the Divine ; Koolaids ; The Hakawati ; and the story collection, The Perv . He divides his time between San Francisco and Beirut.
レビュー
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Disappointing book
Totally tedious book. Story doesn't seem like going anywhere, the way of story telling is confusing. Entire book is a trans lesbian soliloquy. No story, no direction, writing is drab. Disappointing book.
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If you haven't read this Alameddine novel - READ IT.
A brilliant piece of fiction. Rabih Alameddine is a beautiful writer. Rabih Alameddine is a national treasure. I wept 3 times while reading The Wrong End of the Telescope and yet a I left feeling hopeful about the human condition.
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Poetic and metaphorical
Alameddine was on Lesvos toward the end of the migration of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. His fictionalized account doesn't provide a lot of facts about the circumstances there but his prose is so evocative, we feel we understand something deep. Love this book.
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Quality
Although the book was well worn, it stayed intact for the reading. It was as described by the seller.
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not enough engagement with refugees
The advertising blurb was a little misleading, as it made the refugee experience seem primary. Actually, the narrator seemed most interested in telling her own experience of being "trans and lesbian." While I certainly respect her self-definition, the proportion of time spent on her own life made the narrator's work with refugees almost seem thrown in as a ploy to attract more readers. However, the very end of the book, with the matriarch of the refugees, was effective.
関連する文学賞
- PEN/Faulkner賞（フィクション部門） 第42回（2022年） ・Winner