![]() Media accounts had painted a dire situation in Lesbos, yet when Mina arrives, there is at first no work for her to do. She left Beirut more than 30 years ago to attend Harvard and never returned, changing her name, transitioning, and cutting off all ties with her family - with the exception of one brother, Mazen, “the only family member who crossed my picket line after years of silence,” who is meeting her in Lesbos. For Mina, a lesbian trans woman in her late 50s, the trip conjures memories of her childhood in Beirut, since Lesbos is “the closest I’d been to Lebanon in decades.” Narrated by Mina, the novel opens with her arrival on Lesbos for a week to help her friend Emma, who works with a Swedish NGO. ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a chronicle of the Syrian refugee crisis on the Greek island of Lesbos in early 2016 it’s the personal story of Mina Simpson, an American surgeon of Lebanese-Syrian origin who arrives on the island to help with the humanitarian crisis and reconnect with her brother and finally, it’s a work of metafiction - bordering on autofiction - in which Alameddine scrutinizes his own limitations as a writer and his inability to tell this story except in the most elliptical way. Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope may best be described as three books in one. ![]()
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