The longlist for this year’s International Booker Prize is salutary for a number of reasons, not least for Strange Horizons readers the presence of so much speculative fiction across its titles—so many, in fact that we've easily filled an entire week of reviews with titles taken from it.
Such a state of affairs is increasingly unworthy of note, given that the Booker Prize for Fiction has arguably been gifted to a work of speculative fiction for three years straight now, and in 2023 the International Booker itself was bestowed upon a piece of literary SF, Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (first published in 2020, translated into English by Angela Rodel in 2022). Among the other causes for celebration around the longlist, however, is that it affords a fresh opportunity for Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance to reach a wider readership. In Sinan Antoon’s pearlescent translation, this is a novel that is distractingly—and of course deceptively—easy, even pleasant, to read; the novel should be able to find its way to many readers.
Yet reviews and notice of the novel have previously been thin on the ground, despite it not being “new” in the sense that its longlisting might suggest: And Other Stories’ edition of the book has qualified it for Booker contention, but the University of Syracuse Press published it some time ago now, back in 2019. How wide a readership has it enjoyed so far? Well, happily Summer Farah reviewed the book for Strange Horizons, as part of our 2021 Palestinian SFF Special; and Gautam Bhatia also interviewed Azem for us in 2020. But this longlisting—one hopes—will see it approached anew by yet more readers, whose reactions we yet await.
The novel was first published, of course, in Arabic, by Dar al-Jamal, in 2014. In her interview with Bhatia, Azem notes that “[t]he disproportionate attention on what appears in English or is translated to it, as opposed to what circulates locally, is problematic”; any sudden “revival” of her novel by the International Booker comes more than ten years since it first saw press and will in this way only serve to emphasise her point. We shouldn’t, then, treat this book as if it has just arrived to us, new-formed; to marvel at it now is only to admit we should have been doing so beforehand. We are not this book’s discoverers; it has had its message for us a long time. It’s up to us to account for why we may have only recently heard it.
Still, longlisted for a major prize the book has been, and celebrated this fact should be. In which spirit, a word on what this review can do, and what it cannot. I am not Palestinian. I am a reader in English, practically monoglot. I have never visited the Middle East, much less lived there, and though I do my best to remain informed I would not wish to pretend to any expertise. Happily, Farah’s 2021 review centres the experience of Palestinian people in its reaction to the novel, and I’d commend her piece to you above and beyond mine, not least because—again to meditate on the oddness of the International Booker only now turning Anglophone eyes to Azem’s novel—she “know[s] the types of books that appeal to American audiences, the way Palestinian narratives must be framed in order to sell books […] the difficulties in getting to say what we really mean.” I can’t expand on this theme from experience; but I may yet come back to it, with apologies.
There are three reasons that I hope this review might nevertheless be worthwhile: one, the novel deserves to be recognised and rewarded for its longlisting, whatever the curiosities of its eligibility; two, since the novel was first written and then translated into English, violence of genocidal proportions has been unleashed in historic Palestine, and the novel’s inciting incident—the overnight disappearance of all Palestinians living within those borders—must to some extent be read in that new context; and, three, as a critic more or less unqualified to propound upon the novel’s politics, I would be wise humbly to focus instead on its aesthetics—an endeavour I think is itself valuable and instructive. Fortunately, so, too, does Azem, which I took as a particular encouragement: “I also want to stress that the political commitments of readers and critics should not result in neglecting the aesthetics of Palestinian literature,” she concluded in that 2020 interview with this magazine. I’d like not to neglect the aesthetics of The Book of Disappearance.
First and foremost, the novel—and here I should re-emphasise that by “this novel” I mean the novel I have read, the novel-in-translation, which is not necessarily entirely the same as the novel Azem originally wrote—is an experiment in form. For most of its length, it has two types of chapter: first, a set that are presenting as the work of Alaa, a Palestinian man writing to his deceased grandmother in the pages of a red notebook; and second, a third-person account of how Alaa’s Israeli friend, Ariel, reacts to the Palestinian vanishing. Ariel is a liberal Zionist, a man who prides himself on his “Arab” friends and his peaceable approach to the “resolution” of the conflict between the two parties; Alaa is a man coming to terms with the past, and in recording the memories of his grandmother he is seeking to understand the great rupture of the nakba, and indeed to make sense of what it means to be a Palestinian in a world without a Palestine—one in which Jaffa is referred to most commonly as Tel Aviv, or in which he lives on Rothschild Boulevard, down the block from another street named after Arthur Balfour. He writes in his red notebook:
Why am I telling you, again, what you already told me? Perhaps I am writing out of fear. Against forgetfulness. I write to remember, and to remind, so memories are not erased. (p. 74)
A few notes on this. First, of course, it is critical that Alaa’s passages are situated in—saturated in—the past, yet are written in the present tense. That is, he writes of memories and their impacts, to a woman who is dead; within the novel’s chronology, the notebook has been written before the events of the novel begin, since Alaa has, like all other Palestinians, disappeared without a trace. Yet his reflections are voiced as active, urgent, taking place in the now: “I too sometimes have an intense feeling of anger and bitterness when I walk in Jaffa,” he writes, as a man no longer able to walk in Jaffa (because he has disappeared), a city that does not officially exist anyway (because it has been unified into the single municipality of Tel Aviv), to a woman who can also not walk in Jaffa (because she is dead). Yet he feels, is feeling: “I feel I am on the cusp of madness (p. 70).
Ariel, on the other hand, exists in the novel’s present, is part of the community that claims current agency over the streets through which Alaa cannot walk without experiencing dislocation. Yet his narrative is in the past tense, floats disassociated through the immediate:
Ariel walked Feierberg, Melchett, Ayn Fered, and Strayss streets as if leafing through pages in a book. His thoughts reached out to touch street names as if honoring the person who brought this city into being from nothing. Yes, we arose out of nothing, didn’t we? (p. 127)
Ariel is the grandson of English Zionists who arrived in the British Mandate in the 1920s, and he feels duty-bound to honour them, despite his wish for an accommodation between the people he understands as Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. The novel has little time for the sophistry Ariel deploys to bring his conflicting impulses into agreement, and treats him as a case study in failed imagination. “What did Alaa want?” Ariel asks himself bitterly of his friend. “To recognise what Alaa sees would only mean one thing: that we pack up and leave this land. Could it mean anything else?” (p. 96)
Ariel asks himself a question here, and questions appear throughout the novel. I am not sure we are meant to take them rhetorically. “Does a place have a memory?” we read elsewhere (p. 125), or “Who told you a city cannot recognise its people?” (p. 9); “Do you know what it means to spend your life waiting?” (p. 27); “What if we were to scream into their ears? Would they hear us?” (p. 84); “Why couldn’t Alaa just enjoy living in a modern state with all this freedom anyway?” (p. 126); "Why do Palestinian mothers send their children to throw stones and carry out terrorist attacks against us?" (p. 151) [1]
In this way, the novel is powered by queries—and this is, I think, why it revolves around a speculative conceit. In many ways, this novel is a pretty grounded one: its sense of place, for one, is acutely—and, of course, crucially—evoked. And, for all its broad satire of Israeli politics, the scene in which “Prime Minister Titi,” even as his administration grabs more power for itself, uses the Palestinians’ disappearance as an excuse to make a fulminating speech to the Knesset reads today almost as cinema verité (“I call on you to vote for this law, which stipulates that any person who doesn’t celebrate our state and its independence must be deported” [p. 105]). So why choose to centre such a novel on so garish a central incident as the inexplicable evaporation of an entire people? First, of course, the disappearance of the Palestinian people is the wildest dream of the Israeli right and the settler movement: The idea that a people of this land might simply go away is not just a piece of speculative fiction, but in our own world among some a fervent hope. This may be why the novel reads often like Saramago’s Blindness (1995)—that is, as a searingly tender social fable—but at others its unflinching violence and flinty gaze, particularly in scenes that depict the events of 1948, resemble the kitchen-sink verisimilitude of Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023).
I’m struck again by something Azem said in her interview with us: after smartly dodging several questions about her choice of mode (“I think there were both conscious and unconscious reasons behind it”), she suggests more generally that genre “is ‘trendy’ now in Arabic literature. […] What I fear about trends and fads is that they end up domesticating what we produce.” What I take from the interview as a whole is that Azem is highly sceptical of any attempt to “claim” her work for “speculative” or “science” or “fantasy” fiction—that these labels are if not Western products then certainly currently understood through unproductively partial lenses. It seems to me that her own work—and much of the culture and literature that informs it—has other roots, and other ends. In this sense, nothing about the experience of the Palestinians in The Book of Disappearance is speculative at all: their sense of living in Jaffa/Tel Aviv, for example, might to a reader of speculative fiction resemble nothing so much as the way in which people live in the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma in China Miéville's fantasy, The City and the City (2009); yet it presents as a faithful recreation of lived experience. Similarly, perhaps the central sudden vanishing, for all it resembles something as outré as Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly (2020), is in fact a granular expression of experience. After all, the novel is driven by questions, and questions are queries about things which are or might be:
Would the Palestinians have developed the place like this had they established their own state? Ariel wondered as he looked at the timid lights of Jaffa on his left. What if the state hadn’t been established? What if we didn’t gain independence and they had their Palestine? What would’ve happened? (p. 129)
This particular set of questions begins rhetorically, as an attempt by Ariel to dispute the Palestinian claim to the territory in which he lives by suggesting they would use it less well. But the act of asking questions piles one upon the other, and their weight begins to undermine the certainty of the questioner’s assumptions. What would have happened? We've seen quasi-utopian exploration of other paths in, for example, Lavie Tidhar's Central Station (2016), and this question is also, yet differently, the core interest and main method in The Book of Disappearance. What would have happened had Ariel’s grandfather and his colleagues not defined their mission in a certain way, or if his elderly neighbour's comrades had not violently cleared 500 villages in 1948? “In modern states,” Ariel declares at one point, “people chase the future.” Yet they remain defined by memory and history, by paths not taken and others bulldozered; by what ifs and potential; by a past that is, as in Alaa’s narration, present; and by speculation that, as in this novel’s hybridised form, has reality.
One last note on Alaa’s narration: to whom is it addressed? Well, as I’ve said: to his deceased grandmother, the holder of memories which he is attempting to understand—an effort in the midst of which he is interrupted. But to whom is it addressed? Let’s return to the first words from the novel quoted by this review: “Why am I telling you, again, what you already told me?” Because it’s addressed to you.
In the final pages of the novel, Ariel moves down a few floors and opts to take Alaa’s old apartment as his own, “brought the coffee he made just the way Alaa did and went to the bedroom.” There he begins to select “excerpts from Alaa’s notebooks to translate into Hebrew […] to be part of a book he would write and publish on the disappearance of the Palestinians” (p. 162). But these are not the novel’s last words. We, who are reading a book in translation that has been longlisted a decade on for a prize that is limited to works in translation, do not read Ariel’s glosses on Azem’s final page. We read instead that “[t]he red notebook is still open.” And the notebook—here, in our present, not in the marooned literary past of Ariel’s narration—is addressed to you.
What will we make of it?
Endnotes
[1] Hamas does not feature in the novel; its only mention of the group is by Ariel in a newspaper column, an acknowledgement of his Tel Avivian memory of "the two intifadas, the war in southern Lebanon, Saddam's Scud missile attack, and the waters with Hezbollah and Hama" (p. 108). There's a scene of an improvised rock-throwing by two ordinary Palestinians on an IDF patrol (the perpetrator is killed, his friend forcibly detained), but the word “attack” is almost always used in reference to potential assaults on Tel Aviv by external Arab nations. In the real world, of course, Tel Aviv also experiences for example bombings, rocket attacks, and shootings sponsored by Hamas itself and other groups besides. It may be that this absence is part of the novel's fantasy; certainly it is part of its project to emphasise the imbalance between the communities, and to link Palestinian identity with a pre-1948 history. [return]
[Editor's Note: Publication of this review was made possible by a gift from Susan H. Loyal during our annual Kickstarter.]