The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine is a Pen/Faulkner Award winning 2021 novel about Mina Simpson, a transgender doctor who travels to the island of Lesbos in Greece to volunteer with relief organizations to help Middle Eastern refugees. Mina, being of Lebanese descent herself, has to face all of the troubles of her past growing up as she makes deep, personal connections with the families that she helps save from the very land that she grew up in.
Over the course of the novel, Mina spends about a week in Lesbos with a friend named Emma, who is also a transgender doctor. She also makes friends with a jolly Palestinian volunteer named Rasheed, and reconnects with her brother Mazen, who remained in Lebanon. The story is told in first person from Mina’s perspective, but there is another character whom Mina refers to in the second person. This character goes unidentified for the whole novel, even though this mysterious character is referred to every couple of chapters or so. The identity of this character is intentionally left ambiguous, but most agree that this character is Alameddine himself.
In an interview, Alameddine explained that he had done volunteer work for refugees a couple of years prior, but had been overcome by an inexplicable sense of anxiety. This novel was his way of rectifying what he felt was cowardly actions and behaviors that he had during his time volunteering.
While the novel isn’t particularly long at 350 pages, most will find themselves consuming the book very slowly. This is because the reader really has no choice but to consume the book slowly, because of its contents and the way its written. Each chapter is so packed with reality and experiences told as if they were real stories. In many ways, this book is both very simple and incredibly complex.
The novel explores many different themes and perspectives which, in order to understand, require maturity and an open mind. It goes through very deep and often visceral accounts of Mina’s experiences being transgender and coming from a culture that’s so far from ours. Alameddine does not identify as transgender, but he does proudly identify on the queer spectrum. His description of the events and emotions that Mina go through as a transgender woman are very human and really feel as if they were the accounts of a real person. For someone who identifies with his sex assigned at birth, Alameddine really does honor and justice to the unique, personal, and often arduous experience of a transgender person.
It’s for these reasons that I feel The Wrong End of the Telescope is not only a good read, but an important read.