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Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”
Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.
The banking collapse and the Covid pandemic are both played as comedies. The former sees an outraged Zalfa taking to the streets as a protest icon: braving teargas, brandishing homemade signs (“This Grandmother Wants All the Brothers of Whores in Jail”) and achieving, to Raja’s consternation, celebrity among his students.
When the pandemic arrives, Zalfa finds herself home and bored and, worse still, barred from guest appearances in Raja’s Zoom classes. Zalfa needs people; she needs stories; she needs to be listened to. Who better as a friend, then, than Madame Taweel, the neighbourhood mafia boss and inexhaustible source of gossip? The two become inseparable confidantes, bonding over everything from makeup to low-budget films starring Raja in drag, while Madame Taweel’s armed minions politely stand guard outside.
Raja being Raja, of course, does not tell the tale of their friendship straight, prefacing it with a long, only tenuously related tale of his own from 40 years earlier, about a secret lover he had during the war: “Mansour was handsome, hirsute, and hung – very well hung. I rode that beast as often as I could.”
The section set before the civil war trades farce for a measured account of Raja’s boyhood, as in a series of scenes – some funny and others heartbreaking – we see him fail familial expectations of masculinity. The home of a Japanese neighbour offers refuge from the chaos and hostility of Raja’s own and opens a window on to a culture he grows to cherish for its order and minimalism.
The novel’s bravura centrepiece returns to a memory Raja has long repressed: his captivity during the war at the hands of Boodie, a militiaman just a year older. Fifteen at the time, Raja witnesses a kidnapping that ends in bloodshed; Boodie takes him along to spare his life. Over two months, an ordeal Raja later calls both “horrific” and “exhilarating”, his senses of danger and safety, powerlessness and agency, terror and desire are thoroughly scrambled. Boodie is by turns caring and coercive, violent and tender, and the sex they have provokes in Raja a conflicted mix of shame and joy. The narrative refuses to resolve these contradictions, staging the episode almost as a twisted domestic drama with notes of slapstick.
In the novel’s penultimate pages, Raja rejects the label of trauma (“I felt free in that situation. Maybe even happy”), while also refusing the closure of forgiveness. It is not that he cannot forgive Boodie, he says, but that he chooses not to. “I wasn’t hurt because he kept me hostage. I was hurt because I realised I couldn’t participate in a system that seeks to destroy people like us.” Boodie chose to participate in a murderous system: “From the beginning, he chose war.” If anything, what proved traumatic was Raja’s return to a world incapable of accepting him: when he finally managed to escape, he did so, alas, in a dress. Everyone turned away from him except Zalfa.
Sartre held, not uncontroversially, that we are condemned to be free: even the worst setbacks and threats we face acquire significance only through our own “project”, the way we commit to being in the world. Raja seems to take this as his mantra. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother) conveys one message compellingly, and it is this simple but radical one: you cannot change what happened. But you can maybe, just maybe, decide what it means.
