Palestinian prose fiction in Arabic has received unprecedented attention in English-language scholarship in recent years. In his 2012 Catastrophe and Exile in the Modern Palestinian Imagination Telling Memories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), Ihab Saloul examines memories of the nakba (the catastrophic forced exodus of Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948) in narratives of exile. This was followed five years later by Joseph Farag's Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story (London: I.B.Taurus, 2017).

Bashar Abu Manneh's The Palestinian Novel from 1948 to the Present is a more theoretically ambitious treatment of modern Palestinian prose literature. Engaging with Georg Lukács’ theory of the relationship of the novel to history, and Theodor Adorno's defense of modernism, Abu Manneh situates his own analysis of Palestinian works within a critical reading of postcolonial theory. Through his readings of works by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani, Imil Habibi, and Sahar Khalifeh (supplemented with brief analyses of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love [New York: New York Review Books, 1986], and Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun [Brooklyn, N.Y.: Archipelago Books, 1998]), he argues that until the 1967 and 1973 Arab–Israeli wars, and the failure of the Palestinian revolution and concurrent demise of progressive political regimes across the Arab world, Palestinians wrote realist novels whose form and narrative perspective were informed by the nakba and the political optimism of the postwar Arab world. Diminished hopes in the Arab world from the late 1970s and 1980s then gave rise to modernist works that, he argues following Adorno, simultaneously serve as reflections and forms of resistance to political defeat and the impossibility of an emancipatory politics.

Relatedly, Abu Manneh makes an argument about the nature and history of the Palestinian revolution itself and its implications for postcolonial theory. The Palestinian movement for national liberation was, in its early years, a humanist and universalist movement that sought to emancipate the Arab world through the liberation of Palestine. However, in time, he argues, and in particular in the wake of the 1970–71 Jordanian civil war and the 1973 Arab–Israeli war, it evolved into a statist movement whose primary goal became the liberation of the land rather than the liberation of Palestinians and other Arabs. This distinction allows Abu Manneh to make the case for the nation (as opposed to narrow nationalism, particularly as it relates to ethnicity) as a potentially emancipatory and anticolonial category. The distinction between the early years of the revolution and its later character also opens his analysis to include the elegiac works of Khoury and Genet, which otherwise would be out of place within his analytical framework.

To argue that 1967 and the political developments that arose out of that war were a watershed within Arabic literature and culture is hardly original, but Abu Manneh's analysis is the first to systematically enfold literary developments before and after this period within European literary theory. Similarly, the developments in postcolonial theory that he reviews have been widely debated elsewhere and applied by others to the Palestinian context (e.g., Anna Ball in Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective [New York: Routledge, 2012] and Anna Bernard in Rhetorics of Belonging, Nation, Narration, and Israel/Palestine [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013]), but Abu Manneh, uniquely, engages with postcolonial theory in relation to the concept of the national as articulated and practiced within the early years of the Palestinian revolution, returning to Franz Fanon's writings to make his case for the emancipatory efficacy of the nation within colonial and imperialist contexts.

The main strength of Abu Manneh's book, however, lies less in its engagement with theory than in its treatment of the Palestinian novel within the context of Arab thought. Abu Manneh situates analyses of specific works not only in relation to historical events, but also their intellectual contexts within the Arab world, demonstrating how they contributed to ideas, conversations, and political positions of the period he covers. In doing so he effectively communicates the liveliness of intellectual debates, particularly of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the deep-seated need that figures such as Jabra and the novelist ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif felt to engage literarily in such discussions even during times of political despair. Abu Manneh reminds us of the centrality of Palestine to Arab intellectual conversations of the 1950s–1980s and of the vibrancy and optimism of the latter. In this regard, his study works as a useful prequel to Zeina Halabi's The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which examines the Arabic novels that emerged from and engaged with the political failures of the 1990s and beyond. In English language scholarship, Palestinian works are more often treated wholly in relation to the Palestinian–Israeli context such that the defining events of Palestinian history—Abu Manneh focuses on the 1948 and 1967 wars and the First Intifada—are conceptualized solely in relation to their effects on the Palestinians themselves rather than on Palestinians as part of a larger Arab world that was also intensely engaged, both politically and culturally, with at least the first two of these events.

Provocative though Abu Manneh's approach is, The Palestinian Novel is weakened by poor editing and a sometimes confusing lack of precision. Confusion begins with inconsistencies in defining the historical scope of the project (the novel from 1948 to the present as the title indicates, or from 1948 to Oslo as he states in the introduction) and no clear statement of what, precisely, the Palestinian novel is. On what basis both Jabra's The Other Rooms (about Iraq; Al-Ghuraf al-Ukhra [Beirut: Al-mu'assasa al-`arabiyya li-l-dirasa wa-l-nashr, 1986]) and Khoury's Gate of the Sun (written by a Lebanese) are both included is unclear, and the inclusion of Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love, a memoir written by a Frenchman in French is puzzling. Abu Manneh says Genet's work is “proof that Palestinian humanism had universal appeal” (p. 89), but this point is tangential to the main purpose of the study. One wishes that this space had been given over to analysis of the novels written within the stultifying environment of the PLO bureaucracy that Abu Manneh mentions but does not describe (p. 31), and to writers (other than Khalifeh) of the post-Oslo period—Ibrahim Nasrallah and Adania Shibli come to mind. The “PLO” works may not have the literary stature of the novels he does analyze, but they are a part of the history of the Palestinian novel. Moreover, Palestinian history has continued to unfold since 1993 even if Oslo did bring an end to an organized Palestinian resistance movement on the national level. Can Lukács or Adorno help us to understand these later works? In particular, do they help us to understand developments in the Palestinian novel of the past decade, works which can perhaps better be understood as the product of ongoing conditions rather than as responses to specific events?

Abu Manneh's argument about the move from realism to modernism is not entirely convincing, relying as it does on an oversimplification of the trajectory and Jabra and Kanafani's writings, and privileging the defining events of Palestinian history over other regional and local developments and conditions that profoundly affected the lives of the writers he analyzes in different ways. Nonetheless, The Palestinian Novel deserves to be read for its sensitive literary engagement and its thoughtful readings of key texts.