Shattered Vessels

Book excerpt: David Shahar (1926–1997), author of the seven-novel sequence The Palace of Shattered Vessels, occupies an ambiguous position in the Israeli literary canon. Often compared to Proust, Shahar produced a body of work that offers a fascinating poetic and ideological alternative to the dominant models of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua. This book, the first full-length study of this fascinating author, takes a fresh look at the uniqueness of his literary achievement in both poetic and ideological terms. In addition to situating Shahar within the European literary tradition, the book reads Shahar's representation of Jerusalem in his multi-volume novel as a "heterotopia"—an actual space where society's unconscious (what does not fit on its ideological map) is materially present—and argues for the relevance of Shahar's work to the critical discussion of the Arab question in Israeli culture.