Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette

Paperback, 144 pages

English language

Published May 6, 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

ISBN:: 978-0-8112-2907-4

(7 reviews)

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba—the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people—and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the …

3 editions

Dustin reviewed Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail

4 stars

An excellent novel detailing a war crime by a nascent Israeli army as told by its principal perpetrator, and the subsequent investigation of that crime by an anxious Palestinian woman in the past decade. Two stories woven together by echoing details—a dog, a sound, the smell of fuel—and fear. This one comes with a Coetzee blurb and that makes sense, both in the book's content and in the really interesting voice Shibli gives her character in the second half—an almost Dyeresque travelogue narration, but with huge stakes unfurling in the background.