The Wrong End of the Telescope

Mina Simpson is a Lebanese doctor in her late fifties, a surgeon with a Harvard degree and a wife of thirty years back in Chicago. She is also trans, and decades ago her family cast her out; of all of them only her older brother, Mazen, still speaks to her. When a friend who runs an aid organization calls for help, Mina takes a week off and flies to the Greek island of Lesbos and the Moria refugee camp, the closest she has been to Lebanon in decades. There she meets Sumaiya, a fiercely determined Syrian mother who has crossed the sea with her husband and children while dying of liver cancer, and who begs Mina not to tell her family. Keeping that secret binds the two women, and with her friend Emma, Mina tries to get the family somewhere safe where Sumaiya can say a proper goodbye.

Rabih Alameddine tells it in short, oddly titled chapters that alternate between Mina's account of the island and passages addressed to "you," an unnamed and blocked Lebanese writer who urged her to write the refugees' story because he could not, and who sounds a good deal like Alameddine himself. Around Sumaiya he gathers other refugees and a cast of Western volunteers, some admirable and some posing for pictures with beached dinghies. Midway through, Mina tells the writer how she came to be herself, a story that turns on an encounter with a female orangutan in the jungle.

The book is funny about terrible things, and irreverent about the people who come to help; Kirkus noted that Bono, Oprah and Madonna are dubbed "the gods of altruism." Dina Nayeri in the New York Times Book Review wrote that its "irreverent prose evokes the old master storytellers from my own Middle Eastern home." Not everyone was persuaded: Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal found Mina's chats and anecdotes warm at first, but wrote that "it quickly comes to seem like filibustering." Readers who want a plot driven refugee novel should look elsewhere; readers who like a talker with a scalpel wit will stay up with Mina.