This is a surprising and wonderful novel, managing to bring some light and humor to a grim setting. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is indeed about main character Raja and his mother Zalfa, but it is also about the modern history of Beirut and its people. Back in the 1980s when I was in high school and college, Beirut was constantly on the news due to the violence and chaos that seemed to be a part of normal life there. I didn’t quite understand exactly what was going on or why at the time, but thanks to this novel, I have a much better sense of Beirut’s political history and the resilience required to live there. That probably sounds heavy and boring, but what is amazing about this novel is how engaging and entertaining it is, even while detailing the daily horrors that residents faced. Raja is a mesmerizing narrator, a gay man living with his mother and spending his days teaching philosophy to high school students, affectionately referred to as his “brats.” Raja is blunt, honest, annoyed and hilarious. This novel is about his difficult relationships with both his family and Beirut itself.
Raja was born in 1960, and this novel focuses on Beirut from that time until the present. We meet Raja in 2023, and his intent is tell the reader about something that happened to him in 2021; Raja was invited out of the blue to be an artist in residence in the US. Raja had written a short book in Japanese when he was a young man, and that book had been unexpectedly popular in Japan and elsewhere in translation. This meant that Raja had experienced a welcome financial windfall, but he hadn’t written anything since the 1980s. Still, why not take the money offered and go to the US for a short visit? That visit is addressed at the very end of the novel, because, you see, in order to understand what happened in the US (and why Raja refers to himself as gullible), you need to understand everything that happened to him before that.
What happened to Raja? Well, first of all his dysfunctional family happened to him. Mother Zalfa is a strong personality who has no sense of boundaries and few filters. I love her. Her love for Raja is ferocious but its real strength didn’t become evident until after the events of the civil war in 1975. In his childhood, Raja’s father and older brother, as well as Aunt Yasmine, were hard and often cruel toward Raja. Their taunts and disdain fed into his desire for walls, for privacy and for divorcing himself from them as completely as possible in adulthood. As an adult, he and his mother can see just how awful these people were toward Zalfa as well. In adulthood, Zalfa’s assertiveness and protectiveness of her son break down some of Raja’s walls; family and neighbors get invited into his space against his will, often with humorous results. As much as Raja and Zalfa get on each others’ nerves, their love and devotion to each other is undeniable.
The other thing that happened to Raja is life itself — politics, war, economics. One of the early chapters in the novel deals with the banking collapse and Covid, which are going to have rather dramatic impact on Beirut and particular impact on Raja. Government corruption precipitated the banking collapse and ruined the economy for just about everyone. This is the kind of stuff that can wear people down and plenty of Lebanese opted to leave if they could. Shortages, power outages and the like became part of normal everyday life. Raja creates order out of chaos by staying focused on his teaching duties. It’s important to note that Raja is known for being an excellent teacher; parents want their children in his class because his students are known for their successes later in life, and Raja’s former students all speak highly of him. This is something that Raja seems not to understand perhaps due to the walls he builds around himself, but his mother is pretty good at battering them down.
The events of the civil war are key to what happens to Raja later. To write about them here would spoil the story, but he experiences an event that he finds both traumatizing and liberating, and he is not the same afterward. He reinforces his walls but Beirut and his mother are relentless, and eventually Raja has to face what has happened to him and how he is part of a community. Themes of forgiveness and accepting love from your community are front and center, and it’s just lovely.
I can see The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) being one of my favorites at the end of the year. If you are interested in other cultures, modern history, LGBTQ writers, and perhaps want an uplifting read in dark times, this is for you.
