Arabesques

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.

Anton Shammas's Arabesques was a literary and a political astonishment when it first came out in 1986, a book that showed how sophisticated fiction could engage the urgent political issues of the day not as propaganda but as and through the imaginative and linguistic means of literature itself.  The astonishment began with the language in which the book was written. Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote his novel in Hebrew, as no Arab novel had been before, a choice that was provocative both to Arab and Jewish readers. The novel is written in an elegant and elaborate style, alive with echoes, and it is divided into two section, "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 peoples have both lived together and struggled with each other for centuries, and the story as it is told is concrete and sensual, rueful and comic, full of curious and memorable characters and of a boy's wonder at the world. "The Teller" is about the writer's voyage out of that world to Paris and to the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and it raises questions of the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self that have come to preoccupy so many writers today. Shammas's tour de force is a personal and a political narrative and a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.  It is a beautiful manifestation of how words can begin to open up the untold stories of lost worlds and the prospect of a changed world where those stories, and others to come, may resonate anew.

Anton Shammas is a Palestinian writer, poet, and translator who grew up in Haifa, where he attended an integrated Jewish-Arab high school. He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Arabesques was one of The New York Times’s best works of fiction of 1988. His essays in English have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. He is a professor of Modern Middle Eastern Literature at the University of Michigan. 
 
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.