Arabesques showed how sophisticated fiction could engage the urgent political issues of the day not as propaganda but as and through the imaginative and linguistic means of literature itself. Anton Shammas, from a Palestinian Christian family and raised in Israel, wrote his novel in Hebrew, as no Arab novel had been before, a choice that was provocative to both Arab and Jewish readers. The novel is divided into two sections: "The Tale" and "The Teller." "The Tale" tells of several generations of family life in a rural village, and how memory intersects with history where different people have both lived together and struggled against each other for centuries. "The Teller" is about the writer's voyage out of that world to Paris and the United States, as he comes into his vocation as a writer, and raises questions of the authority of the storyteller and the nature of the self. Shammas's tour de force is a reinvention of the novel as a way of envisioning and responding to historical and cultural legacies and conflicts.