Foreigners
John Lanchester, 5 January 1989
Arabesques
by Anton Shammas, translated by Vivian Eden.
Viking, 263 pp., £11.95, November 1988,0 670 81619 1 Show More
by Anton Shammas, translated by Vivian Eden.
Viking, 263 pp., £11.95, November 1988,
Blösch
by Beat Sterchi, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 353 pp., £11.95, September 1988,0 571 14934 0 Show More
by Beat Sterchi, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 353 pp., £11.95, September 1988,
A Casual Brutality
by Neil Bissoondath.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £12.95, September 1988,0 7475 0252 8 Show More
by Neil Bissoondath.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £12.95, September 1988,
“... 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 ... ”
