“Empathy is overrated,” says an unnamed writer in The Wrong End of the Telescope. This writer, an unambiguous stand-in for author Rabih Alameddine, is despairing about his novel-in-progress, a book based on his experiences in Lesbos, Greece, where he attempted to aid Syrian refugees but instead “turned into a mess”, holing up in his hotel room for days on end.
He’s not wrong. Empathy is of limited use in the face of horror and injustice – depictions of which abound in this seventh novel from Alameddine, a Lebanese writer living in the US. It’s a beautiful, well paced, enraging, funny and heartbreaking book.
It is told from the point of view of the unnamed writer’s Lebanese friend, Mina Simpson, a trans doctor living in the US. Mina hasn’t been anywhere near her home country in three decades, and she is estranged from her family, with the exception of her winsomely sweet brother Mazen. When Mina discovers her friend Emma, another doctor, is in Lesbos helping with the refugee crisis, she takes a week off and heads there to assist.
Mina is a thoughtful narrator, and the book interweaves her story with those of the unnamed writer and the refugees she encounters, making the novel a rolling triptych of sorts. Loosely driving the plot forward is the story of Sumaiya, a mother of three who arrives in Lesbos attempting to keep her liver cancer a secret, both from her family and from the authorities who might send her back. Mina’s relationship with Sumaiya deepens as she attempts surreptitiously to provide her with palliative care.
Sumaiya’s tale is representative of Alameddine’s portrayal of the refugee stories: plain, unflinching and deeply observed, without being sentimental or cloying. Many of the book’s short chapters are self-contained vignettes. How to Become a Westerner follows the transformation of an ophthalmologist whose husband has been disappeared; in How to Rob an Armenian Jewelry Store a boisterous father from Damascus claims he fled town to avoid being conscripted to rob said store – Mina and friends are sure he’s lying. Another Kurd, Another Drowning features a young Turkish man who wanted to study music in Belgium, and whose boat sank in the Aegean Sea. He is clutching his violin case when his body washes ashore.
The Wrong End of the Telescope doesn’t so much switch between emotional registers as occupy all of them at once – humour, grief, anger, melancholy, love of every stripe. Mina is a wise, quiet and perceptive woman, and her keen observations give the novel dynamism and life. Her status as narrator also underlines the unnamed writer’s lack of omniscience, an effect that attains great power by the book’s last chapter, when Mina and her wife, Francine, drive the core themes of the novel home. Refreshingly, Mina’s transness is just one of many elements in her story – there’s no cheesy transition narrative. (Though Emma, who is also trans, is unfortunately rather one-note and definitely one of the weaker characters.)
So what is beyond empathy? If attempts at genuine action lead to panic and barricading oneself in a hotel room, what then? While the final chapter gives a stab at partial answers, the novel’s larger, more disquieting wisdoms lie in Mina’s acute understanding of senselessness and mystery – the fact that “What breaks us is rarely what we expect.”
• Casey Plett’s A Dream of a Woman is published by Arsenal Pulp. The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine is published by Corsair (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshopcom. Delivery charges may apply.
