An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

Aaliya lives in Beruit.  She knew the city when it was beautiful and when it was destroyed but at 72, she rarely leaves her apartment.  Fluent in multiple languages, she translates great and important novels.  She has done 37 of them - but no one else has ever seen them.  As the reader, we are allowed inside her brilliant, complicated, and humorous mind.  Although she lives alone, she is attuned to the sounds of the city as well as the words of the group of women who live in her apartment building. Often this eavesdropping results in an explosion of commentary and quotations.  It's really a test of the reader's own literary education.  Although a tragedy ultimately reveals and opens her solitary life,  this is really a story of the life of one mind.  Unnecessary? Hmmm?