There are two kinds of books. The first you forget even before you put them down. The second gnaws at your mind long after the last page is turned, like an undigested bone stuck in your throat. Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance belongs firmly to the latter. It is a novel of terrifying imagination, in which an entire people, the Palestinians, vanish in one night, leaving behind only their traces. Their homes stand. Their fields are green. Their coffee cups sit half-drunk on the tables. But the people themselves are gone.
If you think this is fantasy, think again. Fantasy is only a step away from reality in the blood-soaked history of the Middle East.
Azem, who lives in New York but grew up with the wound of exile, takes what she calls “the ardent wish of many Israelis,” that the Palestinians simply disappear, and pushes it to its logical end. What if they actually did? The premise is absurd only until you realise it has been the unspoken dream of every coloniser in history: Native Americans, Aboriginals, Armenians, Jews in Nazi Europe. The methods change, the desire remains.
Azem’s novel does not shout; it whispers. It shows no gory battles, no heroic martyrs, only silence. Empty streets. The absence of the neighbour you once argued with. A landscape robbed not of its beauty but of its people. In that silence lies the true horror.
As a storyteller, Azem belongs to the tradition of resistance. For the powerless, stories are weapons sharper than swords. She has the gift of weaving history with imagination, of reminding readers that memory itself is a battlefield. Writing about Palestine is always political; it cannot be otherwise, but Azem manages to slip in the personal as well. Her characters are not faceless victims. They laugh, love, quarrel, drink coffee. And then they vanish.
One of the strongest threads in the novel is her treatment of Jaffa, the coastal city once known as the “Bride of the Sea.” In 1948, when Israel was created, most of Jaffa’s Palestinian inhabitants were forced to flee. A bustling Arab city was emptied almost overnight. It became, quite literally, a ghost town. Azem resurrects Jaffa not as a tourist postcard but as a haunted place, haunted not by spirits, but by the absence of its own children.
Some will dismiss Azem’s novel as political propaganda. So be it. Literature has always been political. Tolstoy wrote of war, Dickens of poverty, Premchand of exploitation. To accuse Azem of partisanship is like accusing a fish of being wet. A Palestinian writer cannot write of clouds and roses while her people are being pounded into dust.
The novel is also an answer to indifference. For decades, the world has watched Gaza burn and shrugged. Occasionally, there is a UN resolution, as useless as a condom in a monastery. Occasionally, a Western leader will shed crocodile tears. But in the end, Israel continues to bomb, the Palestinians continue to bury their dead, and the world continues to change the channel.
Azem offers a mirror to that world: what if tomorrow the Palestinians were gone? Would Israel finally be at peace? Or would it be left staring at an empty land, guilty of its silence?
This is not a comfortable book. It is not meant to be. It leaves you unsettled, and that is its achievement. Great literature is not about comfort. It is about truth. And truth, especially in the Middle East, comes wrapped in blood and irony.
I read The Book of Disappearance in one sitting. Not because it is an easy read, but because it was impossible to stop. Like watching a house on fire, you cannot look away, even if it burns your eyes.
Khushwant Singh once said that the test of a book is whether you would lend it to a friend or keep it jealously on your shelf. This one I would lend, but only to those who can stomach both imagination and history in their rawest form. To the faint-hearted, I would recommend something gentler. Perhaps Winnie the Pooh.
