Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
Arabesques
Not quite a straight autobiography. Not quite a conventional novel.
Perfect if you want to walk the blurred line between memory and invention, where identity itself is a shifting mirage.
Synopsis
“Uncle Yusef used to say, It is better for a story not to be told, for once it is, it is like a gate that has been left ajar.”
Anton Shammas’s only novel folds personal history, myth, and politics into a kaleidoscope of fractured tales. Palestinian exile speaks through Hebrew, memory becomes allegory, and autobiography dissolves into fiction. In Arabesques, the storyteller is never still: each chapter a new gate half-open, each silence as telling as the words. The result is a book that performs impossibility — lyrical, ironic, and intimate — and leaves the reader with the taste of a language that both shelters and betrays.
Mood:
hybrid · elusive · fractured · mythic
Tone:
lyrical · ironic · intimate · subversive
It Feels Like
Body:
felt in the chest and the back of the skull
Tempo:
the rhythm of someone trying to remember, and trying not to
Texture:
layered and shifting
A Little Taste
“Alia watched the sunset from her kitchen window, thinking of the man who refused to appear on the horizon. As the grandfather clock struck 6, she tore her eyes away from her window and began putting together dinner, all the while making sure to put 7 plates on the table instead of 8.”
“The whole family stayed on the sides, watching as Hanna passed them by. They saw the anguish on her face but none of them said anything to make her feel better.”
The Aftertaste
To feel autobiography and fiction collapse into one another.
To wander through memory as if it were a house with too many doors.
To hold the paradox of writing Palestinian exile in Hebrew.
Peel With a Drink
To be Read With A glass of Arak, clear and anise-bitten, sipped slowly over ice. It burns and cools at once, like a truth you weren’t ready to swallow.
Peel With a Reel
The Band’s Visit (2007, dir. Eran Kolirin) — a quiet encounter where language, silence, and longing dissolve borders.
Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996, dir. Elia Suleiman) — fragments of Palestinian life told through irony, stillness, and estrangement.
Peel with a Beat
Peel me a Book
Or Try:
Unica Zürn
If Shammas dissolves the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, Zürn turns inward and shatters the psyche itself.
Let's Peel
Arabesques
Not quite a straight autobiography. Not quite a conventional novel.
Perfect if you want to walk the blurred line between memory and invention, where identity itself is a shifting mirage.
Synopsis
“Uncle Yusef used to say, It is better for a story not to be told, for once it is, it is like a gate that has been left ajar.”
Anton Shammas’s only novel folds personal history, myth, and politics into a kaleidoscope of fractured tales. Palestinian exile speaks through Hebrew, memory becomes allegory, and autobiography dissolves into fiction. In Arabesques, the storyteller is never still: each chapter a new gate half-open, each silence as telling as the words. The result is a book that performs impossibility — lyrical, ironic, and intimate — and leaves the reader with the taste of a language that both shelters and betrays.
Mood:
hybrid · elusive · fractured · mythic
Tone:
lyrical · ironic · intimate · subversive
It Feels Like
Body:
felt in the chest and the back of the skull
Tempo:
the rhythm of someone trying to remember, and trying not to
Texture:
layered and shifting
A Little Taste
“Alia watched the sunset from her kitchen window, thinking of the man who refused to appear on the horizon. As the grandfather clock struck 6, she tore her eyes away from her window and began putting together dinner, all the while making sure to put 7 plates on the table instead of 8.”
“The whole family stayed on the sides, watching as Hanna passed them by. They saw the anguish on her face but none of them said anything to make her feel better.”
The Aftertaste
To feel autobiography and fiction collapse into one another.
To wander through memory as if it were a house with too many doors.
To hold the paradox of writing Palestinian exile in Hebrew.
Peel With a Drink
To be Read With A glass of Arak, clear and anise-bitten, sipped slowly over ice. It burns and cools at once, like a truth you weren’t ready to swallow.
Peel With a Reel
The Band’s Visit (2007, dir. Eran Kolirin) — a quiet encounter where language, silence, and longing dissolve borders.
Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996, dir. Elia Suleiman) — fragments of Palestinian life told through irony, stillness, and estrangement.