The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance poses a provocative and unsettling question: what would happen if every Palestinian simply vanished from Israel overnight? Through this bold speculative premise, Azem unearths the quiet violence of erasure, appropriation, and historical amnesia. Originally published in Arabic in 2014 and now brought to English-language readers through a sparse, incisive translation, the novel occupies the unsettling intersection of absence and memory, personal grief and political reckoning.

Told through alternating perspectives, the novel juxtaposes the intimate reflections of Alaa, a Palestinian journalist in Jaffa mourning his grandmother’s recent death, with the increasingly fragmented thoughts of Ariel, his Israeli neighbour and friend. Alaa’s sections, drawn from a red notebook addressed to his late grandmother, are elegiac and textured, suffused with the intergenerational trauma of the Nakba. Ariel’s perspective, on the other hand, reads with increasing unease: as a liberal Zionist, he believes himself sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, yet his response to their collective disappearance is revealing, unsettling, and ultimately damning.

Azem exercises remarkable restraint. She never explains how the Palestinians vanish, nor does she frame the disappearance as a fantastical or miraculous event. Instead, she uses the disappearance as a narrative lens to explore power, memory, and complicity. The sudden vacuum exposes fault lines within Israeli society – from the opportunism of settlers to the confusion of institutions that depend on an invisible underclass. In moments, hospitals falter, prisons grow eerily quiet, farms become unmanageable, and security operations flounder without their defined "enemy". Azem astutely observes how a society constructed around domination is disoriented when its subject disappears.

One of the novel’s most effective and discomforting ironies lies in the appropriation of space and voice. Ariel, discovering Alaa’s empty apartment and notebook, gradually takes both for himself. He becomes the custodian and editor of his absent friend’s memories, controlling when and how the Palestinian voice is heard. This narrative choice – to render Alaa’s reflections only when Ariel chooses to read them – becomes a formal embodiment of the colonial gaze, filtering trauma through the lens of the occupier. The Palestinian perspective remains conditional, fragmented, mediated.

The novel is not without its flaws. At times, the narrative flow can feel stilted, and some transitions between past and present, or between perspectives, are abrupt. There is also a bluntness to certain passages that risks overstatement. Yet these structural imperfections mirror the emotional and political fragmentation Azem seeks to represent. This is not a story that tidies itself into allegory or catharsis. It leaves its reader disturbed – by what is missing, by what remains, and by what is taken.

In a world increasingly numb to ongoing violence, The Book of Disappearance offers a jolt of imaginative urgency. Its haunting premise becomes a mirror, reflecting uncomfortable truths about presence, absence, and the ethics of remembrance. Azem does not offer answers; instead, she leaves the reader with a single, reverberating question: what does it mean to disappear – and who is left to remember?

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Text Publishing