“The True, True, Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) won the National Book Award for fiction in 2025. Written in English, billed as a dark comedy, the novel, like so many others I’ve read from award winning authors with different ideas, jumps all over the place – although the cover blurb says “the book dances across six decades” of his life, although, like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, not in linear fashion. So this must be art today.
A gay high school philosophy teacher in Beirut Lebanon who is closing in on retirement age reviews his life and travails, starting 2023, retreating to 1970 and forward, all in first person. Actual historic events are part of the novel but never covered in either broad or narrow detail, only referenced and only important if he personally experiences their consequences. So civil war isn’t a problem unless it cuts into his routine, his safety, his supplies, etc. But then I expect that’s the case for most civilians during war, unless they have a loved one fighting it.
We circle the troubles between Raja and his mother who insists on knowing everything he’s doing and knowing it in great detail, including his gay sexual encounters which, for a significant part of the book, are omnipresent and with enough detail to envision them. By the end of the novel, Raja is shown the love his decades of students have for him when they attend his mother’s memorial (but we really never see any of his students and him interacting in a classroom – just take the narrator’s word for it,) while also experiencing the love he had for his mother, no matter their constant bickering. ‘nough said…
Frankly, the book doesn’t do for me what it has done for the judges. In my view we have a completely unreliable narrator, but maybe that’s the draw. The reader ‘gets’ that he’s unreliable but oh, what a rascal because he’s “wickedly funny” as well. I do believe the fact that it’s a Lebanese gay man living through tough times in a place where being gay is probably a crime (although that’s never actually stated) is unique, and maybe a story that couldn’t be written without censorship in the past, but is front and center to literature today. So, fiction depicts Truth, with a capital T, which is what I’ve said for decades, and we do get that here and I value and celebrate that.
Alamenddine is also, upon reading about him, an interesting and flamboyant person who has written successfully for decades, and is also a painter of some worth. So here we have the US National Book Award given to a different type of ‘American writer’ but we find that happening more and more.
I’ve also started reading Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel Herscht 07769, where a down-on-his-luck and not-too-bright man is certain a disaster of global physics will bring the world to ruin, and is trying to get Chancellor Angela Merkle’s attention to do something about it while being continuously mistreated by his employer. Written in Hungarian it’s translated by Ottie Mulzet. And, akin to Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s Septology, it is 400 pages in one sentence. Again I struggle between ‘this is brilliant’ and ‘this is crap.’ But forgive me for being an older Midwesterner whose last review lauded O Pioneer by Willa Cather writing about the late 19th and early 20th century in the rural heartland of America. I’m not sure I’ll finish Herscht, but I’ve been reading more widely and probably will continue to do so.
I will remain a Midwesterner and continue to write in that vein for the foreseeable future, (although I have one satire I’m working on which may only be a way of my surviving the insanity of our time.) I will continue embracing the lyrical and nature as a means to convey what’s going on around, between, and inside characters, who will be midwestern, because I can’t help myself. But that’s the pallet from which I work at, narrow and deep in finding fiction’s more universal Truth-Telling.
If you find that passe’ then please do note that as punishment for my shortcomings, I am reading Dostoevsky’s Demons. That’ll teach me…
Write&Read 
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