Minor Detail

Description

By (author) Shibli, Adania – Jaquette, Elisabeth; By (author) Shibli Adania; Translated by Jaquette, Elisabeth

Short /annotation
A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people

Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize

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 past.

Review quote
“An explosive double-telling of a single crime story…. The extreme economies of Shibli”s style—blending aphorism and enigma, dry humor and searing critique—recall the novellas of César Aira and Mario Bellatin. 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.”

Review quote
“Shibli crafts a story that connects strangers to one another through the occupation that has shaped their lives. Nerve-racking and eye-opening.”

Review quote
“”Like an affidavit in its egalitarian specificity—every detail of every character’s action is accounted for, and therefore scrutinized. A starkly poetic accounting of a crime, its burial, and its exhumation.””

Review quote
“In Adania Shibli”s subversively quiet, compelling Minor Detail, threads of connection are embodied in a young woman”s quest to find almost erased history. Written in spare, careful language (praise also to translator Elisabeth Jaquette), Shibli helps reclaim what would be obliterated by forces actively at work yet today, doing so with a narrative masterfully carrying both surprise and inevitability within. This book has devastation and loss to a shattering, wrenching degree, and yet. Yes, and yet.”

Review quote
“Shibli has created a powerful set of dual heroines, women wracked with disquiet and violence, resisting the frames that have first, been chosen for them, then denied to have ever existed. This is an astonishing, major book.”

Review quote
“An intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence—Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control.”

Review quote
“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….For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis.”

Review quote
“A palpable sense of dread pulses beneath Minor Detail<