Arabesques

Anton Shammas’s Arabesques was a literary and a political astonishment when it first came out in 1988, 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.