Arabesques - by Anton Shammas (Paperback)

About the Book

"In 1986 Israeli writers and readers alike were startled by the appearance of a novel about an Arab village in the Galilee and the protean identity of its narrator. That this first novel was written in resourceful and often eloquent Hebrew and in a highly sophisticated narrative mode was remarkable enough. But even more provocative and significant was the identity of the author. For Anton Shammas was not another aspiring Jewish author haunted by the shadow world of the Palesitinains- a familiar theme in Israeli literature- but an author who regarded himself as an Israeli Palestinian, an impossible combination in itself. Shammas wrote Arabesques, in apt, to serve as his "real identity card," the first to be issued for a bi-national culture in that fiercely divided land"--

Book Synopsis

A luminous, inventive, and deeply personal exploration of living in the liminal space between Jewish and Arab, ancient and modern, by a gifted Palestinian writer.

Chosen by The New York Times as one of the best books of 1988, Arabesques is a luminous novel that engages with history and politics not as propaganda but as literature. That engagement begins with the language in which the book is written: Anton Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote in Hebrew, as no Arab novelist had before. The choice was provocative to both Arab and Jewish readers.

Arabesques is divided into two sections: "The Tale" and "The Teller." "The Tale" tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, of the interplay of past and present, of how memory intersects with history in a part of the world where different people have both lived together and struggled against each other for centuries. "The Teller" is about the writer's voyage out of that world to Paris and the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and raises questions about the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self. Shammas's tour de force is both a personal and a political narrative--a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.

Review Quotes

"Arabesques is one of the finest novels about the 1948 Nakba, when an estimated three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced out of their homes and off their land to make way for the Jewish state. Not only did Shammas powerfully describe these tragic events, but he did so in Hebrew instead of Arabic so that an Israeli public could finally confront this story too....In Arabesques, Shammas steers away from politics outright, and yet his novel, lyrical and subtle in its humor, is ultimately very political." --Raja Shehadeh, The Nation

"Has the dawning of self-consciousness ever been so delicately conveyed?" --Ratik Asokan, The Yale Review

"Intricately conceived and beautifully written. . . . A crisp, luminous, and nervy mixture of fantasy and autobiography. . . [and] an elegant example of postmodern baroque." --John Updike, The New Yorker

"This book is a history of its author's youth and the memoir of a family and a fabled region--Galilee. . . A beautifully impressive piece of prose." --William H. Gass, New York Times Book Review

"Arabesques is a classic of the exploration of identity. . . A Palestinian master of Hebrew, living at the seam between the ancient and the modern, between loyalties and appetites, Shammas has written beautifully about his search for design. He transforms fact into fantasy without changing a thing." --Leon Wieseltier

"Arabesques really brings, as novels were once supposed to bring, 'news' from elsewhere. . . This book has already added something notable to Israeli literature." --Irving Howe, The New York Review of Books

"If Hebrew literature is at all destined to have its Conrads, Nabokovs, Becketts and Ionescos, it could not have hoped for a more auspicious beginning." --Muhammad Siddiq, Los Angeles Times Book Review

About the Author

Anton Shammas (b. 1950) is a Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew, and English. His novel Arabesques, originally published in Hebrew in 1986 and translated into nine languages, was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best seven works of fiction of 1988. A professor emeritus of comparative literature and Middle East studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Shammas's essays have been published in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Critical Inquiry, and The New York Review of Books.

Vivian Eden is an American poet and translator who lives in Jerusalem and works on the staff of Haaretz.

Elias Khoury is a literary critic, novelist, editor, playwright, activist and public intellectual. The author of twelve novels, Khoury's work has been translated into numerous languages, and he is considered one of the foremost novelists writing in Arabic today.