Rabih Alameddine’s New Novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), Reviewed in Alta Journal
Posted in Announcements
On August 25, 2025, Lannan Visiting Chair Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove Press, 2025) was reviewed in Alta Journal.
From “Time After Time”
“It is hard to do justice to Rabih Alameddine’s seventh novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) , without giving too much away. The book functions as a set of nesting dolls, offering stories embedded in stories, a series of overlapping detours and evasions that ultimately coalesce as a vivid and coherent whole. In that sense, the novel is as much about the storyteller, or the process of storytelling, as it is about the substance of its narrative. Imagine a 21st-century Scheherazade—in the form of a 63-year-old gay Beiruti teacher named Raja—spinning stories to keep himself and his 85-year-old mother alive in a dangerous and disruptive world.
To facilitate such a mix, Alameddine constructs The True True Story of Raja the Gullible like an accordion, bracketing it with two short chapters set in 2023 and using the space between them to take his narrator back and forth in time. One story, or memory, leads to another as the novel telescopes and folds in on itself. The result is a book of willful delirium, one that deconstructs its own narrative. Alameddine has long worked with innovative structures; his 2001 novel, I, the Divine, unfolds as a series of first chapters. Twenty-four years later, the shape of this new work of fiction highlights both the insufficiency of memory, of story, and their utter necessity.”