It's a beautiful novel, plagued with literary references, as well as musical and philosophical. I had to read it with my Notepad App opened to write down all the marvellous and intriguing authors. 
 In the space of almost 300 pages and 3 actual days (the first of which takes one half of the novel), we get to know Aaliya, the history of her family, her friend Hannah and the city of Beirut. She's a 72-year old translator who's never published her work, but who, for the last 50 years, has every 1st of January started a new translation (from the English and French translations she creates a new one in Arabic). She believes she has no purpose, her life no meaning--she believes herself unnecessary--which she has come to accept by quoting some of Pessoa's best and most tragic poems to herself. She hates novels that rely on an epiphany (which made me sad because Dubliners!), psychological novels that would make you believe that life's a sequence of causes and effects. Novels should represent how life really is, she defends: lacking in meaning, random and mysterious. The entire format of the novel, symbolically, and an event that takes place almost at the end, literally, support that: people die and you'll never know why, people will do things for reasons you won't understand, none of us will survive the passage of time. Still, it is not bleak, first because she is (despite her underlying depression) pragmatic and then because she does have some sort of epiphany by the end (which prevents this from becoming The Remains of the Day-tragic), one that seems to mean that, yes, maybe life makes no sense, you'll die and leave nothing behind but--but first, you'll live.