A woman, Sumaiya, arrives with what looks like late-stage liver cancer. Volunteers are abundant but grotesquely interested in posting selfies with the refugees, and she’s at a loss for where to start helping. (She’s Lebanese and married to a woman, and an early wisecrack about a “Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos” gets the easy joke out of the way.) Her expectations are quickly upended. So “Telescope” is a peculiar novel, intentionally - a prismatic, sui generis story that’s unafraid of humor while addressing a humanitarian crisis, threading a needle between that urge to witness and the recognition that doing so may be pointless.Īlameddine’s guide through this challenge is Mina, a trans woman doctor who arrives on Lesbos at the urging of a friend. But a sense of futility is equally inadequate, and Alameddine has no taste for the magical-realist variants or high-flown lyricism attempted by other novelists when writing about refugees. Still, he wrote, “if nothing else, I could be a witness.” Witnessing, and the question of how best to express what you’ve witnessed, is at the heart of his seventh novel, “ The Wrong End of the Telescope.” He’s plainly decided that earnest, eat-your-vegetables social realism is inadequate it would be no better than the journalism Westerners have diligently ignored since Syria’s civil war began a decade ago. Perhaps, he thought before departing from his home in San Francisco for his first trip, the children in the camps would enjoy talking about soccer? One refugee woman flung his questions back in his face: “If I talk with you, will anything change?” He had only one answer to that.

By his own admission - in a fine 2017 essay titled “ Hope and Home” - he approached his visits deeply naive. In recent years, the writer Rabih Alameddine has visited Syrian refugees in his native Lebanon and the Greek island of Lesbos. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

The wrong end of a telescope