Anton Shammas—Arabesques

she snapped the twigs and threw them into the fire out of boredom

Jan 18, 2023. Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden. NYRB Classics.

(If you want to read extremely good long-form criticism, check out Cleveland Review of Books, the magazine I publish and work on with a “dedicated and brilliant” staff.)

Arabesques, published in 1986 in Hebrew by Anton Shammas, a Palestinian Christian Arab, easily lends itself to an “identity-reading.” It goes without saying how politically and religiously heightened the tensions in the Middle East between and within Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are. Then you add on top of that a legacy of western colonialism. Etc. It’s a crazy backdrop for a novel disguised as a memoir, written primarily in the first person by an author recollecting his own and his family’s history from the ~1930s~ through the day it came out. But the personal search for origins, identity in relation to secrets held and secrets spilled, chance encounters in one’s childhoods and enchanted letters from missing patriarchal figures, the eventual merging of the search for identity gleaned from family history and geo-political macro-events brutalizing village life playing into the author’s (non-)decision to become a writer: these are the tensions that sustain the novel.

The book is split between two alternate parts that plant seeds to look for in the other, each gradually showing that each exists for the other, the search itself and what is being searched for, sifted through. The first section, “The Tale,” is a family history. Uncles abandoning aunts to secure their family’s future outside of the village (in Palestine), whether it be Beirut or Argentina. Anton’s father’s provincial life as a barber and cobbler. Tragic adoptions and even more tragic childhood deaths. Elderly deaths attempting aversion via various forms of sorcery, from ten year-olds to priests. The superstitious co-existing with matter-of-fact everydayness, facts staring you straight in the face, alongside three different religions. Bitterly accepted marriage proposals. People’s stories being fatalistically imposed on them from above or from an inner sense of their life being determined, existing next to the writers, who we find in the second part (titled “The Teller) breaking away from their regional milieus to “make sense of it all,” creating their own identities only to be tempted back in, psychologically and materially, for a chance at an even deeper understanding.

The novel juxtaposes mysticism, looking for truths in the shape of oil in a plate of water, with the level-headedness of the intellectual, without favoring one or the other, “magic” or “realism.” It’s an incredibly sober book that achieves that Marquezian effect while refreshingly insisting that there is reason for superstitious, the mystical is here among us.

All in all, I’m really happy to have stumbled on this book. NYRB classics can begin to feel like a dime a dozen, flooding the high-brow indie book market, taking up space in a certain type of readers’ consciousness just as, say, the Criterion Collection does for film-lovers. But this sense of over-abundance quickly falls to the way-side almost whenever I pick up an NYRB Classic. This one was worth publishing.

Formally innovative for its time and of monumental importance within the context of Hebrew language literature, congrats to it and Shammas for its semi-official Western canonization. I did my quality control on the text, it checks out.

Unless…did he even write the book? A certain Mr. Sayed in the book is one to keep an eye on. I still don’t fully understand it. Oh, the feeling when the truth seems to be steady, when an origin is found, only to be offered the casual suggestion that…your search was only a diversion, and the truth is in the random patterns your search takes you in, a pattern that can only be seen as a shape that makes sense, as that truth, as an arabesque, by God himself.