Always Coca-Cola

by Alexandra Chreiteh, Michelle Hartman (Translator)

Always Coca-Cola is the story of three very different young women attending university in Beirut: Abeer, Jana, and Yasmine. The narrator, Abeer Ward (fragrant rose, in Arabic), daughter of a conservative family, admits wryly that her name is also the name of her father s flower shop. Abeer's bedroom window is filled by a view of a Coca-Cola sign featuring the image of her sexually adventurous friend, Jana.

Genres: Fiction, Lebanon, Middle East, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Novels

144 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2009

About the author

Alexandra Chreiteh ألكسندرا شريتح is a Lebanese author known for her frank writing and portrayal barriers faced by Arab women.
Alexandra Chreiteh was raised in a religiously conservative region by her Russian mother and Lebanese father. Chreiteh completed her Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
After being granted a graduate fellowship by Yale University, she began her PhD in Comparative Literature during the fall of 2009. While at Yale, Chreiteh has completed her Masters of Arts in Comparative Literature in 2012 as well as a Masters of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in 2013. She has also been teaching creative writing at Yale.

Reviews

[نوري · Rating 2 out of 5]

أشعر بأني لا أستطيع مسامحة الكاتبة على إنهاء الرواية بذلك الشكل، بنية الرواية متماسكة والحوارات ومكان الأحداث - بيروت - كل شيء جيد حتى قررت الكاتبة التوقف بلا فرامل ودون سابق إنذار أو غلق أي باب قد قررت مسبقاً أن تفتحه في ذهن القاريء الذي أخذ من وقته ليعطيه لها.

[Iana · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book. It looked so perfect as something to suggest to my Arabic students - short, funny (according to the reviews), youthful. The review below must be the worst I have published, ever.

This is easily the most terribly written book I have read in the past decade. The author was frightfully young when she wrote it - I think barely 20, if that, and it really shows. Apart from obvious lack of depth in her observations and character shaping, she had clearly not done much reading of good literature at that point in her life - neither Arabic, nor foreign - and had no idea what makes a good book. The book has no plot. It reads as a weird compilation of everyday observations with arbitrary links between them. Three pages describing how the friend's car is moving slowly through a traffic jam in the heat - first it's hot and dusty ((cue in long description of the heat and dust), then some guys on bikes come over to peer in through the window, then one of the friends turns on the radio that plays a song by Sabah, from where the main character's thoughts move on to her father and what he had once said about Sabah, and a joke about her plastic surgery, and her debts, and the sadness of youth's inevitable decline, and ... that's it. Move on to a different topic. Why did we just read these three pages of, let me say it, excruciatingly unimaginative Arabic? The rest of the 94 pages is no better. I am reading this for the second time now, desperately trying to see exactly how this "novel" could get the reviews it did, and I am still flabbergasted. Perhaps the English translator took pity on the author and embellished the scanty prose with some logical connections? This seems to be the only possible explanation to me.

For the English-language readers who are assuming that things got lost in translation - um, no. The awkward language, the bumpy style, the one-dimensional imagery, the flat humor and the shallow characters are all present in the Arabic text. I am reading the English translation next, for the sake of comparison, but am holding out no hope. Really, if it turns out to be a more enchanting read, this will be all to the translator's credit.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I highly recommend reading the translator's afterward first and part of me is convinced that it is the mostly intellectually intriguing part of the book, especially the interplay between translator and writer, language and politics. In fact, if one is able to read it in the original Arabic, I highly recommend doing so. The translation, though a valiant attempt, does not quite do the story justice. Moreover, one should be well versed in Lebanese culture and politics, because otherwise the book is incomprehensible.
The book itself is barely one hundred pages. Others have complained about the lack of a plot and the lack of depth in the characters, but that is exactly the point. The book is an attempt to poke fun at the well-educated, young bourgeoisie of Lebanon and their globalized society, much like the movie Clueless. Those interested in globalization, class politics and Lebanese culture will find this an entertaining beach read. In fact, if there were ever such a thing as an Arab Lit beach read, it would be this.

[Jalilah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was unexpectedly good! It reads like light chick lit but it's really much deeper. It's really about women claiming their own bodies and globalization. I would recommend it to anyone wanting to know more about women and society in modern Lebanon.

[Akeiisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think something got lost in translation. Marketed as "edgy" with "cynical humor," I found this to be a rather pedestrian read with some feminist overtones countered by traditional/conservative values parroted be the main character. The characters are flat and I didn't really care what happened to them, as the story didn't really go anywhere and there were no real consequences or outcomes.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very important social commentary, I am so sorry for this author for getting bad reviews from people who don't get it. Start with the translator's afterword!

[Bianca · Rating 2 out of 5]

In spite of this being a short book, it took me quite an effort to finish it.
The story was not divided up in neither chapters or paragraphs. Somehow I think it would have been more readable if it would have been. It also added up to the impression that it lacked a story line.
The occurences and conversations couldn't grasp my interest until I had already read 2/3 of the book. Unfortunately, as the author is touching upon a very interesting subject: the vulnerable position of women in Lebanese society.
If it weren't for my book club, with whom I agreed on reading Always Coca Cola, I probably would not have finished it.

[Nayab · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really nice book lost to translation. I am really glad that I read the editor's note. Because like HOW do you translate one of the richest languages into the language of a colonizer that always falls so flat (and lacks expression)?

It's harddd and the editor knows it too. Regardless, I enjoyed this book and was also horrified with just how much I can relate with this as someone living in south asia.

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between a 2.5 and 3.0. A short read providing a glimpse into Beirut.

[Ilona · Rating 1 out of 5]

A short, easy read, set in Lebanon and written originally in Arabic. I read it because I was curious to read a book from this culture, and encouraged by a web site which suggested it amongst 10 'beginner Arabic' books. I chose it above other titles because it was funny.

It wasn't funny. Now, I am quite willing to believe the problem is with me rather than the book. Maybe if were more familiar with Arabic writing and culture, I'd have seen the humour.

There were some almost-funny bits, but the humour was slapstick and primitive, the sort of thing nine-year-olds snigger at. And again, I wonder if this is just my ignorance of the culture, and the only humour I caught was the most obvious and crude. Could be.

Mostly, I was baffled by the book. The three women are very different: Yana, a Rumanian immigrant to Lebanon, Yasmine, who is obviously gay, even thought the narrator, Abeer, remains completely unaware of this throughout. Abeer is obviously the most cautious and conservative of the three. They are friends, but I really couldn't see what held them together.

The scene that absolutely puzzled me the most was the rape scene. Abeer goes into work because her boss is upset at something she's done wrong. She arrives, he's angry and shouting, then kisses her violently, throws her to the floor and "enters her between her legs". The very next sentence, she's at home, mulling over the implications of her loss of virginity.

At no point does she consider the man, why he did what he did, that what he did was wrong. It's as if, once the act was finished, he's irrelevant. She worries whether people can tell she's no longer a virgin. She worries she might be pregnant. She worries about what she will tell her friends. But though it's clear she didn't enjoy the experience, it doesn't seem to have traumatized her in any significant way. Given that she had been a virgin prior to that ugly experience on the floor of her boss's office, and given the premium placed on virginity in her culture, I would have expected her concerns to be more than merely logistical.

It was bizarre.

And then she's not pregnant, her family doesn't find out, and her Rumanian friend returns to Rumania. The end.

The book felt like it was the diary of a 14-year-old. There was virtually no introspection, no psychological awareness. It was all "this happened, then that happened and I worried about this or that, and then this happened."

It just felt ... odd.

It's my first Arabic book. I'm going to try a few more, see if I can get a context for this. Maybe the narrator was supposed to be an emotionally deficient airhead. Maybe profound things were being conveyed which I completely missed. Maybe Arabic literature lacks a psychological awareness; after all, until Freud (who died in 1939) we didn't have that awareness in our culture.

I didn't enjoy the book, didn't find it compelling, found the characters shallow shadows of almost-people... but is that the book, or just me?

I just don't know.

[Kevin Harrington-Bain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really more of a 3.5 star book.
A pretty short read, I still haven’t decided if the lack of chapters or divisions contributes to or detracts from Always Coca-Cola’s strengths.
Above all, this novel’s depictions of globalization and branding/consumerism are really well conveyed, ever-present if not always addressed or spoken of directly. Abeer is an appropriately frustrating character, and frankly a bad friend, but the world in which she lives and operates sheds so much light on how all of that came to be, and how it is sustained. Especially being an American reading an English translation, while I do my best to temper my reading according to cultural differences, I couldn’t help but appreciate how it seems that the Western cultural parallels, embodied in the looming Coca-Cola, are the source of much of the difficulty and ultimate moral confusion. It is jarring to see the consistency between these Lebanese characters’ understandings of gender and sexuality and the understandings of many, typically conservative, Americans. It challenges the ways in which I frame those understandings, problematizing simply naming them as regressed or ignorant.
Reading the translator’s afterword was both helpful in navigating some of the particular context of the story (taking place in a very specific region of Beirut), but was most of all fascinating to see the ways that Hartman tried to convey the Arabic meanings and effects in English.

[Amelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abeer's bedroom window is the perfect view to a billboard featuring her friend Jana's face. Jana seems to have it all: good looks, a boyfriend, a modeling contract. But when Jana confides in Abeer and Yasmine that she is pregnant, a tidal wave ripples through the group. Jana is lucky that she is the one who is pregnant, and not Abeer nor Yasmin. Abeer and Yasmine must navigate Beirut, knowing that shame would befall them if it were ever found out that they were looking into an OB/GYN as unmarried women--even though it's not for their own personal needs.

But when Abeer is assaulted, societal, personal, and friendly pressures all mount with one single focal point: Jana's face in Abeer's range of sight at all times.

In its translation, I'm afraid some of Chreiteh's criticisms and jokes were lost. While Hartman did her best to both please Chreiteh and make her text accessible, it read sometimes a little disjointed. However, I feel that the heart of Chreiteh's text shined through: that women in Beirut still are subject to scrutiny, and the mixture of capitalism, patriarchy, and shame are enough to tear the bonds of friendship apart.

[Islam · Rating 3 out of 5]

عطشانة كتير... جيبلى كوكاكولا

[Laurieanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a novella, really just a vignette of a few days in the life of a 20-something Lebanese woman in early 21st century Beirut. There is no plot, not even character development. Abeer has some significant experiences, but we don’t see her learn or develop from them. The book descriptions and reviews suggest “cynical humor” and that the story grapples with themes of global hegemony and “social anomalies,” but it fell short of all those.

I chose this book because I was looking to read something from a region and country I know little about, and what it did give me insight into was young women aspiring to the images of global brands while navigating realities of a specific, conservative culture. It was an easy book to read and the author wrote it when she was a young University student and it had the feel of high ambitions but not yet the perspective and skills to fulfill them.

There is a note at the end of the book from the translator which is an interesting explanation of how the process worked and some of the problems grappled with during translation.

StoryGraph Reads the World 2024: Lebanon
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge 2025 #9: Read a book based solely on its setting.
Taylor Swift Reading Challenge #68: 22/A book written by an author in their 20s.
Ultimate Book Riot Reading Challenge #59: Read a book that is set more than 5000 miles from your location.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know why my book group chose this as an example of a novel about identity politics, though it is definitely about the difficulties of being female in a conservative & patriarchal society. Male characters are on the periphery, always ready to judge female behavior, some are otherwise beloved relatives, some engage in casual harrassment on the street, one is an actual rapist--they are outsiders to the deeply female world of social & biological fears & anxieties portrayed in the novel. There is also an interesting question about translation, since the novel is originally written in Arabic but the author indicates that the majority of conversations between the narrator & a major secondary character take place in English, so the English translation of the novel is a re-translation... too complex for me to enter into here. This secondary character, a Westerner, carries her Orientalist conceptions of what she believes her life in Lebanon will be like to inevitable disappointment. The translator never indicates that the expression "Daiman..." ("Always...") has multiple meanings in the text: as a common colloquial expression of thanks for hospitality, as the ad slogan for the global brand named in the title, and as the brand name of the sanitary products sought after throughout and the purchase & use of which is attended with great shame. A curious little novella.

[Nouran · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only reason this book got 2 stars is that it managed to suck me back into a binge-reading cycle. This book lacks depth and seems quite out of place in this time and age, or maybe I'm the one who have been reading a lot of liberal books. Anyways, this book being based in Lebanon and supposedly written by a Lebanese author came out extremely orientalist. Furthermore, the story was incredibly rushed, we never got to know any of the characters in depth not even the narrator herself (who is honestly beyond annoying). The claim that this is a novel is a false, this reads like a lousy short story. There is hardly anything to say in this review; because there is no story, but I could add the fact that the "style" (if we dare call it so) of writing was terrible. This should have never been published.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read about contemporary life in Beirut because even the patriarchy and capitalism there is unlike the life I live. But although the novel could only be set there, it didn’t offer the depth of cultural significance that I was looking for. It introduced intense topics like honor killings, abortion, and rape but brushed these issues off too superficially. The plot itself was impossible as two westernized women would be unlikely best friends to such a conservative protagonist.

[Briana-Cecilia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do you ever read something and think "what am I reading" THE ENTIRE TIME.

I kept waiting for something to happen, for something to make me go "ah, now it makes sense." But nope. No chapters, an insufferable narrator/FMC. Which sucks because this sounded really interesting.

Also, if I had to hear them talk about their period smell ONE MORE TIME.

Shoutout NYPL for letting me check this out for free, cause I almost spent $18 on it.

[Muhammad Yusuf Tarr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd read negative reviews of this novel and found it comically difficult to obtain. The writing was not perfect, sure, and it felt rushed and perhaps underdeveloped. But the life of a young, college-student navigating new experiences from different friends while sitting in Beirut traffic feels anything but grand. A sad novel, testament to jealousy, insecurity, and finding a sense of self, I thought Chreiteh created a work that was enjoyable to read.

[Alishba Tahir · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see a lot of potential untouched with this one. The characters could have been more multi-dimensional just as much as the story itself. So many characters went unnoticed, Waleed, abeer’s parents, yasmine and yana’s families. And the climax was brushed off as if nothing had happened, the built up anxiety didn’t really work but instead just made me feel angry towards the protagonist for not doing anything about it.

[Valentina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish the translator's note had been at the start of the book - it contextualized a lot of the things I didn't understand while reading it. I think this was a very difficult book to translate into English and a lot of the meaning and subtlety was probably lost in the process although I will never actually know because I can't read Arabic

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

2-2.5 stars

Everything was good, at first - a solid 3 star start. The satire was evident and carried over (to a degree) in the translation. However, the novel's abrupt ending felt like an abandoned project or a hurried ending to an exam essay with minutes left. (Part of the satire? Unclear.)

Content warning if you choose to read the book: sexual assault>r@pe scene description

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abeer is kind of judgy but you can understand why. She’s not afraid to share her opinions either. She thinks Yana is Naive when she misses so many context clues.

I will say I was surprised to find only one line about the actual author written anywhere in the book.

Sometimes they’ll use words and translate them and sometimes they won’t. It’s a quick read.

[Allyson Lejzorowicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the story. I loved how different the young women were. I enjoyed the narrators raw perspective. She was judgmental and true to her beliefs.
I enjoyed the other’s journeys as well. I just didn’t like the organization of the book. There were zero chapters, one long short story. The disorganized layout is the reason for the three stars. It made it hard to follow.

[brady steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was fine. it didn’t blow me away, but i think there was really interesting characters in this story. i wish they expanded on the us imperial and colonial presence/anti-us sentiment, but it was also a short novel.

[daeskull · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't get past all the damn exclamation points in the book. The translator uses them like periods on otherwise benign sentences. This alone ruins the book, the crappy plot seals the deal. Awful book that does not represent Lebanese culture.

[Yomna Meles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A different kind of my commonly read novellas. However the dialogues were gripping, and I had a taste of Lebanon. I wasn’t really satisfied by the ending it ended too soon , maybe i wanted more of Lebanon!

[Elaf RI · Rating 1 out of 5]

من أسخف ما قرأت، آسفة!

[Gray♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book but so many things rubbed me the wrong way. This book really doesn’t have a plot either so there wasn’t much of a redeeming factor.

[BaSila Husnain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Traumatising but impressive