Adania Shibli's Minor Detail is an intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence, whether it occurred in the past or contemporaneously ... Though the time period and perspectives change, Shibli’s writing is always extraordinarily descriptive, minutely detailing each movement that either protagonist makes. In a place in which the borders and landscapes are changing all the time, Shibli gives a sense that all that can be counted on is the discrete physical movements of a person’s body ... In this novel...injustice is about only one event, recognized by one person many years after it occurred. But this does not lessen the horror of it, and by writing the horrifying event in the present, Shibli renders the viciousness in stark simplicity. Though a spare novel, Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control.

As a literary project, a historical record, and a translation, Minor Detail is, simply put, brilliant ... the narrative proceeds with the technical, methodical precision of a military operation ... The prose is sparse and cutting, bare enough to progress without passing judgment ... s a book that says precisely what it needs to say—nothing less, nothing more. And I mean this as the greatest complement, the highest form of praise. Shibli writes to both give voice and honor silence; Jaquette does the same, rendering her prose with a sharpness that pulls us along, on edge. There is pain, here. But there is history, too. The smell of gasoline. The sound of a dog howling. A simple stick of chewing gum, reminding us of how the world gives and takes, and how we, as humans, are complicit in the act.

... [a] slim, searing novel ... Shibli’s writing is calm and tightly controlled, lyrical in its descriptions of cruelty and uncertainty. The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it is shining off the page ... All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed. The settlers and soldiers she describes in the second half of the novel are rendered with no malice or artifice; she writes of an elderly settler’s veined hands with tenderness, and as an author is never judgmental or didactic. The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.

... the language stripped down to irreducible details, the narrative built up from a pattern of glinting images ... Shibli’s most ambitious novel to date ... A critic and occasional curator as well as a novelist and playwright, Shibli is an intensely visual writer. The extreme economies of her style—blending aphorism and enigma, dry humor and searing critique—recall the novellas of César Aira and Mario Bellatin, two writers equally loved by artists, as well as the later prose works of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. But the first part of Minor Detail is so vividly composed that it almost reads like cinema, bringing to mind scenes from Claire Denis’s landmark film Beau Travail ... In the second part, Shibli’s supreme attentiveness to the landscape, to the grotesque details of the outer world and her character’s peculiar way of seeing them, nearly obscures the novel’s inner purpose—which is to question, provocatively and on several levels (literary, philosophical, political, forensic), what makes a story true...To Shibli’s great credit, she leaves the question open as the plot takes over ... in the act of writing such an evocative, tightly wrought fiction, in her invention of such a complex, fighting character who is at once the victim’s double and the author’s stand-in, Shibli not only reflects the deadening conditions of occupation. She also, crucially, transcends the damage they have done.

... elegantly translated ... The novel is halved into two narratives of equal length, one after the other, and the first recounts an atrocity occurring precisely twenty-five years prior to the second. And through this daring and ingenious architecture, Shibli creates a text of resistance in which the second narrative seeks to recover the past events of the first from erasure. Shibli tells both narratives through an absorbing style of methodical, dispassionate reportage with an obsessive attention to mundane detail, as if she were narrating a series of incidents documented on a video camera ... Shibli tells both narratives through an absorbing style of methodical, dispassionate reportage with an obsessive attention to mundane detail, as if she were narrating a series of incidents documented on a video camera ... The manner in which the first narrative is underlaid beneath the second, as if it were a palimpsest, as if it were a town buried and then unearthed in the second, is one of the Shibli’s greatest achievements in the novel. Through her unique double narrative structure, she suggests that the marginalization of the Palestinian people persists and their lives and history remain just as tenuous as ever, threatened by violence and erasure.

Told in a procedural style redolent of the clinical detachment that typifies Coetzee’s own prose—an almost preternatural smoothness that seems to evade ideological commitment, as though the author is hiding behind the jointless armature of his prose ... Shibli is a deft chronicler of the blinkering of life wrought by oppressive regimes, the way their manifold codes and proscriptions tighten around perception like a coil of barbed wire ... In a way, Shibli seems a hierophant of the minuscule—in her text, minor details suture the past and present together, operating on a sub rosa level that beggars historical elision ... Shibli’s novel seems to model a wandering historicism, proceeding from one minor detail to the next and tracing, in the process, the filiation of sorrows, or what Édouard Glissant once called 'the relentless resumption of history.'

Her writing is concise ... her sentences are pared down to the bare minimum ... Shibli’s writing is in tension with what it cannot say. Information is cut out not because it’s useless, but because, like the sun, it’s too painful to look at directly ... It’s rare that a novel so subtle in its construction and sparse in its prose can cut so deeply. Shibli warps time, collapsing the past and present, to depict a Palestine that has learned to live with wartime atrocities, 'in everyday life.'

Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers—it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma ... a brilliant beginning (skillfully translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), reminding us that landscapes aren’t neutral facts but the results of artistic as well as ideological cropping and framing ... Does Shibli’s retelling of this old atrocity make it into an allegory for the origins of Israel? She doesn’t imply that the crime is representative in any obvious sense. Instead, she carefully particularizes her version of the story, noting dates, fully imagining each scene and detail of camp life, situating the episode as a discrete moment of history. All of Shibli’s work points to a suspicion of allegory and its abstractions. She is at pains to locate the political dimensions of her fiction in the quotidian lives of individuals—especially those who feel alienated from any collective project.

... startling, cinematic ... Shibli’s masterly, acidic work of subtle symbolism and plot symmetry gives no access to the thoughts of the Israeli soldiers or their victim, making the Palestinian woman’s subsequent first-person narration all the more arresting. This is a remarkable exercise in dramatizing a desire for justice.