Foreigners

John Lanchester

  • Arabesques by Anton Shammas, translated by Vivian Eden
    Viking, 263 pp, £11.95, November 1988, ISBN 0 670 81619 1
  • Blösch by Beat Sterchi, translated by Michael Hofmann
    Faber, 353 pp, £11.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 571 14934 0
  • A Casual Brutality by Neil Bissoondath
    Bloomsbury, 378 pp, £12.95, September 1988, ISBN 0 7475 0252 8

Attentive readers of the Guardian’s news pages will already know about Arabesques. A 1986 report from Jerusalem told readers of a first novel by a 36-year-old writer which was making a big stir: it had already sold 22,000 copies. (An equivalent figure in Britain would be a hardback sale of 270,000.) A very important contributory factor behind the sensation the book was causing was the fact that its author, Anton Shammas, was an Arab writing in Hebrew, his ‘stepmother tongue’. Shammas describes himself as an ‘Israeli Arab’ – an ambiguous, problematic identity which is the subject of his novel.

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