Product Description

Available again, Arabesques is a classic, complex novel of identity, memory, and history in the Middle East and points beyond - including Iowa and New York City. Anton Shammas, the first Arab to write a novel in Hebrew, has given us a riveting look at a people we hear too little about: Palestinian Christians. Arabesques was chosen as one of the best books of 1988 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #698546 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Review
"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 Jews and Arabs, 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, New York Review of Books "If Hebrew literature is at all destined to have its Conrads, Nabokovs, Becketts and lonescos, it could not have hoped for a more auspicious beginning." -Muhammed Siddiq, Los Angeles Times Book 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"

That the publisher lists this in the "Literature/Middle Eastern Studies" categories on the book jacket suggests that there's some extraliterary dimension to Shammas's admittedly autobiographical story. Beside the whiff of sociology, there's novelty as well: Shammas is the first Christian Palestinian to write in Hebrew, and his family tale mingles with the lore of his displaced group. Spanning Arab life from the 1860s to the present, Shammas's "fragmented structure of juxtaposed time zones and images" (to use "Kirkus's "description in 1988) "ultimately combines into a vivid portrait of Middle Eastern life." This "anecdotal history" travels widely and "gets the better of our narrator," even though "family bonds prove stronger than the forces of dispersal." A bit confused by "the largely unnecessary device of introducing a hidden narrator," "Kirkus "considered Shammas's family mystery a "vibrant and original" work. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Anton Shammas is Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.

Customer Reviews

From a small villege in the galil to the midwest of America
Anton Shammas wrote the book like a crafstman. Like a crafstman using a threads and a needle he is using words and stories, going back and forth in time, between reality and fiction. Slowly he gives his readers the pleasure of gathering the details into one existence, that is so fragile. The story of a small village in the Galil starts in the end of the 18th century and ends in the beginning of the eighties of the 20th century. The book start in The Galil and end up in a small town in the midwest. The story of the Palestinians and their broken reality. The book is telling the story of Anton the writer or Anton the fiction, playing between several stories or realities. The style is changing according to the time of the story that is being told, making the book fasinating and challenging. Shammmas, a Palestinian israeli wrote the book in hebrew, this is an important detail in understanding the full complexitiy of the book. This is a very important book for people who are interesting in the Palestinian and The Israeli culture.