Minor Detail
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Minor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed one year after the War of 1948, which Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement, exile, and refugeedom of more than 700,000 people, and which Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence.
Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah reads about this ‘minor detail’ in a larger context, and becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession.
In this compelling novel, Shibli’s haunting prose is a form of resistance in itself.
Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic. She teaches at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine and divides her time between Jerusalem and Berlin.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.
‘Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman – to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.’ J. M. Coetzee
‘Adania’s writing emerges urgently without ever neglecting the poetry in the mundane. That’s Adania Shibli: subtle yet alarming, quiet and effective; profound, playful, and potent.’ Lit Hub
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shibli's startling, cinematic novel (after Touch) centers on crimes against Palestinians in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War and in the present. In August 1949, a group of Israeli soldiers enters the Negev, a desert region in southern Israel, led by an unnamed maniacal officer who's secretly suffering from a venomous bug bite. The soldiers ambush and kill a group of unarmed Bedouins, then return to their camp with the sole survivor, a young Arab woman whose tragic fate is tied to the officer's rapidly deteriorating state. In the 2000s, a Palestinian woman in the West Bank reads an article about these events and becomes obsessed with learning more after realizing they occurred 25 years to the day before she was born. Borrowing a colleague's ID card to leave the West Bank and enter Israel, despite her fear of borders, which "shake and destabilize me to the point that I can no longer fathom what is permissible and what is not," she heads to the site of the crime. 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.
