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.

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.

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.