Raja is a portly gay 63-year-old teacher in Beirut who lives with his overbearing, impossible mother. He calls himself gullible, although I think he’s being overly self-deprecating; he’s surrounded by lunatics, and lived through more history than most of us, from the Lebanese Civil War to the collapse of the country’s economy to the 2020 explosion at the city’s port. Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award, follows him in a sort of picaresque fashion through his memories of these and other major events in Lebanese history, as he ends up in one ridiculous situation after another, often with the city around him in ruins or chaos. It’s consistently funny, even in its sorrows, with an indelible main character (and his mother) as our tour guide through a sort of absurdist realism, where the improbable takes place right amidst the actual over the course of six decades.
The prompt that opens the novel is that Raja, a philosophy teacher who wrote one book that was reasonably successful, receives an invitation from a foundation in the United States to pay for him to come to their compound and give a lecture. This, he tells us, he accepted, because he is gullible, and it turned out to be a mistake, although we won’t find out what happened until the penultimate chapter of the book. On the way to that story, Raja walks us through multiple episodes in his life story, each tied to some major event in modern Lebanese history. He missed a huge chunk of the Civil War because he was kidnapped, but not by enemies: it was by a friend of sorts from school who hides Raja away after he witnesses a murder. He’s saving Raja’s life, but he also insists that Raja teach him to dance so he can sleep with some girl in their class – clearly assuming Raja can dance because he’s gay. That’s just the setup; the story goes off the rails from there, or perhaps the rails were blown up by the Israeli invaders. Who can say.
Raja is truly a delight as a narrator and a main character, and his relationship with his mother, who loves to respond to him in paradoxical fashion with “Fuck your mother,” is both an important throughline and a consistent source of laughs. The novel’s nested-stories structure allows Alameddine to jump around through time, while Raja and his mother are there in every one of those stories – true or not, as some of these tales are hard to believe, notably the one of the kidnapping, where Raja and his kidnapper become lovers in a sort of kicked-up gay Stockholm syndrome. Each of the stories, including the resolution of the speaking invitation, which itself is hard for Raja to believe because he’s not an author – he wrote one book, 25 years earlier, that wasn’t successful in the United States, so why on earth would someone there want him to come speak? The answer to that, as with so much else in the book, is hilarious on its surface, but comes with layers of meaning that point to Lebanon’s inability to reckon with or learn from its own history, which keeps looping back on itself, from crisis to crisis, with the Lebanese people always the ones to suffer – including Raja, who takes each setback in a fatalist’s stride.
There are probably further layers of the book that I missed because I’m not that familiar with Lebanon’s history; what I do know is largely through an American lens, such as the news coverage of the hostage crisis, which obviously didn’t paint Lebanon in a kind or accurate light. Alameddine depicts an entirely different Beirut, that of a worldly city with many modern aspects, beset by corruption and conflict, but one where a gay philosophy teacher and his overbearing mother can live their ridiculous life, with a too-large coffee table and a parade of terrible relatives, in something resembling happiness. It’s a richly textured work that takes great tragedies and packages them in wry humor, all delivered by one of the most delightful narrators I’ve encountered in ages.
Next up: I’m way behind on writing up books I’ve read, but right now I’m reading Andrei Bely’s Petersburg.