The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
by Rabih Alameddine
Summary
Raja is sixty three, a beloved high school philosophy teacher in Beirut, gay, wry and exquisitely put upon, and he shares a tiny apartment with the novel's other main event: his mother Zalfa, an octogenarian force of nature who regards her son's desire for privacy as a personal insult and requires briefings on his work, his friends and his love life, preferably in that order and at volume.
The occasion of the telling is an invitation: an all expenses paid writers' residency in America, arriving just after a run of personal and national catastrophes has left Raja wanting nothing so much as quiet. The residency is anything but, and the telling refuses every straight line: Raja narrates in nested stories, doubling back, contradicting himself, promising the true true version and then revising it, and through the loops the reader assembles both a life and a country. The life: a Beirut childhood, a teacher's vocation, loves concealed and lost, betrayals personal and political, and always Zalfa, whose comic tyranny slowly reveals itself as the book's great love story. The country: Lebanon from 1960 to 2023, civil war, occupations, the garbage crisis, the financial collapse, the port explosion, history arriving in a family sized apartment one disaster at a time.
The comedy is constant and the wounds are real, and the gap between them is the book's method: the gullible of the title is the man who kept believing, in people, in Beirut, in stories.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want a mother and son double act worthy of the ages, and Lebanon's whole impossible history smuggled inside it.
Historical Context & Significance
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2025, the capstone recognition for Rabih Alameddine, the Lebanese American novelist and painter who had circled the prize culture for years: An Unnecessary Woman, his 2014 novel of a Beirut recluse and her translations, was a National Book Award finalist, and The Wrong End of the Telescope took the PEN/Faulkner. The win made him one of the Arab American writers most visibly centered in the American canon, a position he has occupied with characteristic irreverence, in fiction and on a famously unfiltered social media presence.
The novel's nested, digressive telling is his signature, the Arabic storytelling inheritance, hakawati is the title of an earlier book, turned on contemporary catastrophe, and its Lebanon runs on documented history through the 2020 port explosion and the state's long unravelling.
Interviewers received the mother, Zalfa, as one of the year's great characters.