Adania Shibli

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

Minor Detail

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 expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Shelby Doherty

The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return. And so, before I am completely consumed by anxiety and horror, I go back to bed and soon fall asleep.

Again and again, I build settlements and dismantle them, until I realize that I shouldn't waste any more time here.

The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it.

As for the incident mentioned in the article, the fact that the specific detail that piqued my interest was the date on which it occurred was perhaps because there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing.

All I can do without risking calamitous consequences is work at the office, or sit in my house at my table in front of the big window.

And the plants simply don't resist. They just surrender to the fact of their fragility, that the wind can do what it wishes with them, fooling around with their leaves, passing between their branches, penetrating their boughs, and all the while it carries the dog's frantic barking, tossing the sound in every direction.

Besides, sometimes it's inevitable for the past to be forgotten, especially if the present is no less horrific.

Bilge Ince

The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences.

sometimes it’s inevitable for the past to be forgotten, especially if the present is no less horrific;

Saffia

We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable

of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here, and to expel them for good.

The south is still in danger, and we must do everything we can to stand our ground and remain here, otherwise we will lose territory. We must not hesitate to devote all the strength and vigour of spirit that we have to building this part of our infant state, and protecting and preserving it for future generations. This requires that we go after the enemy, instead of waiting for him to appear, for "If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first."

Marion

•We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here, and to expel them for good. After all, Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vegetation that lies before them, reducing, day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We, however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people.

The cold factualness describing the events within the first part of the book and then, the casualness with which it describes what is the everyday, nearly normalised, reality of Palestinians in the second part, makes the book nauseatingly impactful.

I really have no clue how to rate something like this. The meticulous attention to detail, the inevitable horror of it, the sweltering and suffocating atmosphere…I don’t even know what to say. 

Hannah Bateman

In my acknowledgment of the significance of this book and its author, I have to say this: i could not finish this book because of the writing and prose. The themes and the story itself was exceptionally harrowing and tells an incredibly important story but it was, for me, unreadable due to the writing 

Alison Hinklom

just two days ago, the al jazeera journalist team in Palestine was murdered, joining the thousands of other lives taken by zionists. this book is a reminder of how easily a life can be snuffed out, becoming a minor detail amongst countless other tragedies— it puts into perspective every injustice woven into the daily life of a person under apartheid rule, every anxiety, every forgotten life. i can’t put into words how despairing this book is. Free Palestine!

jade shen

One of the most harrowing novels I have read in recent memory. An unflinching and sobering account of the brutal reality of Palestenian existence under the Israeli apartheid occupation.

meillaya

Narratively, the book captures the timeline of oppression powerfully. A story of a ‘minor detail’ that keeps repeating through time. Portraying the cruelty of war’s consequences, it emphasizes violence against women as a hidden and persistent side effect of war.

Mara D Alo Fonseca

Haunting, hard but necessary.  

Narratively, the book captures the timeline of oppression powerfully. A story of a ‘minor detail’ that keeps repeating through time. Portraying the cruelty of war’s consequences, it emphasizes violence against women as a hidden and persistent side effect of war.

as the title suggests, a detail that leads you down a path in which you easily got lost in, that keeps you for pages of pages with held breath, only to punch it out of you. what an important work, as relevant now as it has been for the past several decades 

tiff <3

sani

completely haunting. and yet it is not fiction. this is what palestinians went through and which has worsened gradually with the course of time.

Amna A.

The book has two parts, both about women struggling under the Israeli occupation. One part is set in 1948 narrated by an Israeli soldier, the other takes place about half a century later from the perspective of a Palestinian woman investigating the events that happen in the first part. The book feels like two ends of a scale, each part cannot be more different than the other, yet they are linked by certain symbols and themes that balance each other out.

ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ for the first part, i was on edge all the time because of the animal bite and the ending took me by surprise. The second part was honestly a bit flat up to the last 4 pages. Ngenes banget endingnya begitu ㅠㅠ but maybe there's not much to life but pursuing our mundane obsessions anw. And how fucked up is it that in some worlds the price of being a little clumsy is death. Nyesek :(

Jeremy Boyd

From a young Palestinian writer comes this compelling look at the Israel/Palestine conflict, from both the perspective of an Israeli soldier in 1949 as well as that of a young Palestinian woman.

annalyse! 

i don’t know where to begin. i feel as though my heart is going to jump out of my chest.

a detailed sense of impending doom written in words that have no choice but to create the scene right before your eyes 

donna 

It's horrifying that this is based on a true story and even more horrifying that there are so many stories like this that will remain untold because they have been erased from history. Life under occupation for Palestinians is shocking, to see how they're treated like criminals in their own country and have been for 75 plus years is devastating. 

"Man, not the tank, shall prevail."


Minor Detail is written in two parts:

PART I:
The first part told in third person with a male's factual, concrete, naturalist, cold, and devoid of emotions who's the commander of a group of Israeli soldiers patrolling the Negev Desert.

Set in August 1949, a year after the Nakba, an Israeli platoon was delegated to observe the Egyptian border after the proclamation of the state of Israel. The discovery and killing of a group of unarmed nomadic Bedouins, and the rape and murder of a girl found with them.

PART II:
Told in first person by a Palestinian woman in Ramallah with passionate, oneiric, and, I think (other reviews seem to agree) some form of autism.

The woman found a story in newspaper decades later and becomes haunted by one minor detail—the fact that the girl's in story was assault happened 25 years to the day before the woman was born. The crime catches her eyes because the date of the story occurs on August 13, her birthday.


REVIEW
Even though it is already finished, I still processing the horror of atrocities. Shibli gives profound focus on action, with no room for thoughts or feelings, and even the names. Like a choreography of violence. Such heavily-detailed stories and traumatizing.

Despite its lack of dialogue, the diction and the words are pretty well defined, aka this novella is rich in narrative. Conceptually, it is easy to understand, yet seems less effective because of the heavily-detailed. But imo, the details work so beautifully to create an oppressive and bleak atmosphere.

After did some research, Minor Detail is based on real event, a war crime investigated more than 40 years later, using new unclassified documents, by the liberal/center-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz here:

https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty...

sputnik sweetheart

“The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences.”

“We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago."

The novella is divided into two parts of the story. The first part is narrated by a distant third-person voice, following a commander of an Israeli soldier group patrolling the Negev desert. In contrast, the second part is narrated by a first-person voice, a Palestinian woman, probably forty years after the atrocity occurred. One depicts a determined drive to occupy a vast land in a horrid, gruesome, and cold manner, while the other portrays a risky journey, hanging by a thin thread, attempting to cross one border after another. Though these narratives may seem to contradict one another, the small details between the past and the present alternate, and the stories intersect.

Each detail—from continuous barking fills the air in two sets of time. Plants pulled to their roots in the past yet the plants persist in growing in the present. Almost identical sets of paragraphs describe the systematic habitual washing routine of the commander. The wound from the bug bite continuously worsens from day to day—serves its symbolistic purpose of forming a profound depth into the story. 

"However, they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting. Moreover, others claim, based on the same idea, that it is possible to reconstruct something’s appearance, or an incident one has never witnessed, simply by noticing various little details which everyone else finds to be insignificant."

As readers progress through the first chapter, some might find themselves perplexed by the exposure to an event with details so minor. However, as the narrative unfolds through the later chapter, Adania Shibli explains how these seemingly insignificant details serve a purpose—they work as building blocks to create a comprehensive mosaic of the event. How even the smallest detail contributes to reconstructing the wider narrative. They become integral in offering a different perspective on the event, fostering a deeper understanding of the intricacies of the story.

This book will continue haunting me for a long time. A must-read for those who wish to get a closer look at what the occupation of the land of Palestine has brought into the lives of two girls in two different time periods, each narrates a different kind of horror but each is as haunting as the other.

syadrina

I bought this book in January. My first historical fiction in learning about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by settler colonialist israel. A two-act novella that strikes a balance between depth and readability. Short, sharp, and will never leave you alone without feeling haunted. The first chapter was narrated in a third-person observation over the entire course of tediously disturbing, monotonous scenes of a murder of Palestinian teenager in Summer 1949, one year after the Nakba. In the second chapter, the main character takes on the role of the narrator, attempting to investigate that barbarity which coincidentally took place 25 years to the day before she was born. Whether the character stands as an object within the story or drives an independent narrative of her own, both ultimately encounter a shared destiny: becoming victims of the enduring brutality of inhumanely sadistic, bloodthirsty, barbaric settler colonialism across generations. 

Frankfurt Book Fair — the largest and most important international book fair, taking place October 18-23 — has denied space for Adania Shibli and her novel Minor Detail while simultaneously issuing a statement that they stood “with complete solidarity on the side of israel”. Silencing Palestinian voices in the wake of an actual genocide happening in real life. 

Adania said in one of her interviews that “to think about Palestine is already a position of privilege” — I think about this statement from her a lot. Adania led me to acknowledge the actuality of my privilege. To be able to contemplate, to engage with the news of the atrocities happening every hour if not minute, to feel heartbroken is a privilege. Adania reminded me to ask my own self, how do I exercise it properly and not let it become a detrimental indifference? To this day my question remains.

(review updated: 18/10/23)

“Solitude is so forgiving of trespassed borders;”

“There are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details—like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.” 
Found this book from my book club (thank you for those who gave it free access to the world!) because I believe everyone at least needed to have this knowledge for what is happening in the world right now. While the time of Palestine force by Israeli in 1946, there were lot of young Palestinian women were raped, killed, by soldiers in the Negev desert. Years later, a Palestian writer risked her life to find this truth and figure out what behind it— as they called it as ‘minor detail’. Like the title itself, this book offered a lot of details on the tragedy, it’s quite bluntly disgusting and creepy for my preference. 

This book will have two different part of time, but you wouldn’t feel confused since it has no short part that jump to another one in the right time. With only 141 pages, the author made it astonishing frightened. I can sense how crumble the sky above to make them remember all of these… Still wonder how this book suddenly took off from Frankfurt Book Fair and I get it now. Beside literary, I think this book is core historical/political fiction. The language usage is also easy to understand— it’s like a young adult novel with blunt creepy plot and tragedy (if that makes sense). I believe everyone needed to spare their time for a bit to have their inner-sense with this book at least once in a life time.

diya

No matter how much I tried to stop in between, just to take a breather, I couldn't. Haunting. Daunting. Heartbreaking. None of these adjectives will ever be enough.

Pseći lavež koji se prelijeva iz prvog dijela knjige u drugi. 

Još uvijek, ja samo stvarno ne mogu razumijeti nešto toliko protivno mom biću na primjer.

Pored toliko zla nisam sigurna u književnost, na istoj razini kao i život, samo je.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

Pseći lavež koji se prelijeva iz prvog dijela knjige u drugi. 

Svaki detalj.

Još uvijek, ja samo stvarno ne mogu razumijeti nešto toliko protivno mom biću na primjer.

Pored toliko zla nisam sigurna u književnost, na istoj razini kao i život, samo je.

Historical fiction set in time of Israeli independence/palestinian Nakba and contrasting with present day occupied Palestine. 

Novel as resistance! Reading as resistance

https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty-article/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world/0000017f-db62-d856-a37f-ffe2fa5b0000

Historical fiction set in time of Israeli independence/palestinian Nakba and contrasting with present day occupied Palestine. 

This book is gut wrenching 

Novel as resistance! Reading as resistance

Actual incident reported here: https://www.haaretz.com/2003-10-29/ty-article/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world/0000017f-db62-d856-a37f-ffe2fa5b0000



Intense. Took me on a journey of morality and gut wrenching truth

Sufia imran

Siya S

2.5 stars, rounding up to 3 

This was my second Palestinian book (the first one was Etaf Rum's A Woman Is No Man which portrays a claustrophobic, culturally oppressed life of Palestinian women in America). Anyway, I don't know how to feel about this much-rave piece of literature. Maybe I'm not smart enough or artful enough to be the right audience for this book. It's too subtle while at the same time unnecessarily wordy. It's horrific, but there wasn't much of a plot. 



Granted, the first half was shocking as it grotesquely unveiled the true face of war. But the overall style of writing seemed to be too repetitive for my liking (like, do I have to read about a guy dry-showering himself and addressing his wounds for how many more times? and about the gum-chewing rituals of the heroine? I don't mind if this was a novel, but as a novella I expected something straight to the point. This book at times felt like someone trying to hit a 10,000-word-limit of a report assignment when all you have was a 500-word "core" of the story.... 

But the book's called Minor Detail, and thus it was the minor detail that was the main focus. Perhaps the joke's on me.

Minor Detail

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