(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Life can often like a series of existentially testing events, punctuated by rare moments of levity and joy and wrapped in a lifetime of pain, hurt, loss and hard-won gains.
That might seem bleak but for most it’s an accurate take on this thing called life, and the extent of its angst-driven and exhaustingly experienced truth is displayed in all its tragicomic glory in The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine.
This beautifully written novel, which bristles with life’s spiky bits and its more comedic accompaniments and which sparkles with prose that manages to stab at the heart while eliciting knowing laughs, often in the same artfully realised sentence, captures what a life night look like when it’s all laid back by a protagonist recounting the last sixty years of his life.
Raja is a sixty-three-year-old man living in an apartment with his octogenarian mother; he is the “neighbourhood homosexual” who simply wants a quiet life to enjoy his books and walks and who is trying to forgot some quite traumatic events from his teens that forever shaped his heart and life.
Alas, a fairly sizeable error of judgement by his mother results in her having to move in with him in his Beirut apartment, and where Raja wants to be left alone, his mother wants to know everyone, and know about everyone even if, like Raja, they really don’t want to have their lives and selves excavated for Zaffa’s vibrant enjoyment.
As I watched my country implode, as the currency devalued at a vertigo-inducing rate, I kept trying to convince myself I was lucky. I tried to convince my mother. She would have none of it.
Zaffa is a pocket-sized dynamo who has always lived life large and who embraces the world around her with gusto.
This irritates the hell out of Raja, who finds his mother a force of unstoppable nosiness who thinks nothing of violating any elements of separation that her son seeks to put in place between them, but what Raja doesn’t appreciate is that his mother is also a fantastic, unstoppable force for good who is loved by a diverse array of people, something Raja only discovers much later in The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).
And given that this is Raja’s story, told from his viewpoint, what we get is the story of a mother and son who love each other, and Zaffa loves fiercely and with a parent’s furious need to protect and nurture, but who don’t know how to live with each other.
Not so much a problem when they’re in separate apartments but problematic when they are cohabiting and space is tight and emotions tighter and tauter still.
A wide-ranging and expansive book, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) uses many of the punctuation points of Lebanon’s history from its civil war to its financial collapse to the 2020 explosion which levelled swathes of Beirut and killed hundreds, to tell the story of one man who simply wants an untroubled life but who seems unable to find it, either in the past or the present day.
(courtesy official author site)
One of the masterful aspects of The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is the way in which the author is able to go wide and epic in the novel’s narrative spread while staying emotionally close to the ground and giving us an intimate portrait of one man and his struggles to craft the life he wants in seeming defiance of everyone and everything around him.
The novel doesn’t shy away from Raja’s sexuality and how it has shaped him and how he interacts with the world but The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is at its heart a story of how love influences everyone and how no matter who we are or what is happening to us, we are all racing after love in one way or another.
One of the telling and traumatic storylines in the book happens when Raja is an older teenager and some fairly intense events happen to him which find an echo many years when he is offered a writing scholarship in the U.S., an invitation which seems too good to be true and which turns out to be just not at all what Raja hopes or expects.
In fact, this seeming gift from the literary gods, handed to Raja in recognition of the talent he displayed in the one book he wrote, which received global recognition and attention, ends up ripping Raja out of whatever accommodation he has made with his past and his uneven relationship with the present.
And [redacted]? I refused to think of him ever again. I cut him out of my memory. I forbade my mother to bring him up. I wouldn’t allow him any life in my life. He wasn’t just dead to me — he never existed.
He is forced to relive a past he would rather did not emerge from a deeply dug grave, but in so doing, he is finally able to make some form of peace, however ill-formed and incomplete with his present, something he didn’t think he needed but which it turns out he very much does.
Laced with Raja’s gloriously entertaining sardonic voice and awash in a sense that life is an absurdist gothic horror show that we must strive to survive by the skin of our teeth, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a brilliantly funny, emotionally vulnerable novel which dares to wonder if forgiveness is possible when so much trauma and loss has happened to you.
Can you ever make peace with your past when so much continues to percolate into, and in Zaffa’s case, push wantonly in, to the present?
If you ask Raja, who simply sees indignity piled upon frustration stacked onto fury and resignation, at least at the start of the novel, he might likely say no, but as The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) progresses he begins to realise that perhaps his judgement is faulty and maybe he needs the people around him, god forbid even his mother, more than he realises.
Rich with emotional honesty, savage wit and some intense twists and turns in the story of what it means to be alive and to experience the best and worst of life, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) celebrates love, embraces family (even the broken ones), muses on forgiveness and ultimately finds a place where perhaps the past and the present can exist and there might even be living to be done too.