The Wrong End of the Telescope Summary
Rabih Alameddine

The Wrong End of the Telescope Overview

Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope is narrated in the first-person voice of Mina, a doctor who travels to the Greek island of Lesbos to volunteer her help during an ongoing refugee crisis. Through flashbacks to Mina’s gradual understanding of herself as a transgender woman and her Lebanese background, as well as stories of refugees, Alameddine explores broad themes that span the personal and political, such as necessity, empathy, and anger. Despite its serious subject matter, the tone of the novel is playful and irreverent. The author uses self-conscious humor and metafictional elements to raise questions surrounding perspective and how people inhabit reality and imagination in different ways.