In the summer of 1949, one year after 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel during what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, and Israelis call the War of Independence, a group of Israeli soldiers rape and murder a teenage Palestinian girl. In the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah—who was born exactly 25 years after the crime—becomes fascinated with the case to the point of obsession, venturing into Israel to search for missing details.
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.
