Arabesques

I flat out loved this book from page one. Above all it is a celebration of storytelling itself, as its free-associating narrator weaves together an intricate pattern of stories that make up three generations of family history. The overall narrative jumps backward and forward in time, making connections between incidents and people across decades. Meanwhile, 20th century history is rapidly redrawing the map where it all takes place - its Arab Christian characters inhabiting a village that finds itself after 1948 part of the new state of Israel. John Updike in a New Yorker review quoted on the cover describes it as "postmodern baroque," the author being a character in his own fiction and the narrative itself shifting among several styles and structures, including don't-trust-the-narrator flights of fancy - a meeting described in detail is then revealed not to have happened, and then a hundred pages later is reported again as actually happening - in exactly the same detail. Another key scene, involving an attempted suicide, is broken into fragments scattered throughout the novel like jigsaw puzzle pieces for the reader to assemble. Scenes are told and retold from different points of view. The personal stream-of-conscious reminiscence of the opening 73 pages turns suddenly into a section of seemingly unconnected vignettes taking place in Paris. Later the narrator becomes part of a gathering of international writers at the University of Iowa, where an actual Norwegian author, Bjørg Vik, appears as a character, and an unflattering portrayal of another writer, Yehoshua Bar-On, suggests parallels with Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua. Like its playful title, the book delights in what is finally a vast literary confectionary, all of it representing on another level a perfectly sobering portrayal of lives lived in spite of adversities, personal misfortune, and the grinding wheels of history. First published in Hebrew in 1986, "Arabesques" has been lovingly translated. Thanks to the University of California Press for keeping it in print.

Coping with sudden change is the subject of the Palestinian-Israeli writer, Anton Shammas, in his beautiful, labyrinthine debut, Arabesques, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. He begins with Sub-Marquezian tales, sometimes veering close to the exotic, that describe the little Arab village of Fassuta, one that chose not to resist the Zionist annexation of 1948. In describing different generations of his family, he moves between time and place at high speed, interweaving history and autobiography through chains of subordinate clauses, but still achieving clarity. The book becomes progressively more complicated as the focus turns to Paris and America, where the narrative line turns precarious. It is an important novel in that Shammas's pointillist Palestinian history is today intertwined with the present world crisis. Its outcome will partly be measured by how we in the West grasp that the plight of the Palestinians is our plight too.

This book is one of the few that gives an outsider's look from the inside of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is deeply moving and insightful, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in broadening their views on the topic.

"A piece of the Palestinian fate that would confuse even King Solomon," writes Shammas. This book is an enchanting but difficult read. The presence of the Irish writer in Iowa City reminded me of this book's similarity to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both novels are written in a sometimes confusing stream of consciousness style and are filled with symbolism. I would need to read Arabesques at least one more time before I could begin to comprehend much of the imagery. The author attempts to convey certain images of the Palestinian people, including the differences amongst this very non-monolithic group, and the complex inner thoughts of an enigmatic refugee. The main character's lack of a single identity can be seen as symptomatic and/or symbolic of the Palestinian people's historical experience.

Arabesques is one of the finest novels I have ever read. It is highly poetic prose and a magical exploration of childhood. The kinship thicket is sometimes difficult to unravel, but it provides wonderful insights into Palestinian culture and its built-in conflicts.I highly reccomend it to fellow readers. I do certainly hope Shammas has written other novels since then, and, if so, I would like to see them translated.