Name: Minor Detail
Rating: 4.223790322580645 (124 reviews)
ISBN: 9781922268693

Adania Shibli

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.

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.

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.

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 

🌝🌝

The concept of a “minor detail” is one I know all too well, hyper fixating on a specific fact or detail and the impact it can have on your life. While I appreciated the sentiment, I think the structure of this novella was too redundant and not as gripping as it could’ve been, it felt extremely sluggish. Part of me wonders if it would’ve been better received in Arabic. Regardless, I think it’s an important and relevant reminder of the disturbing nature of the Israeli Occupation Forces and the horrific erasure of Palestinian lives, even now. 

Rana Sulieman

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

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

personal library, bought from greenlight bookstore fort greene

Patricia K

andi ☆

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.

absolutely heartbreaking, even in its smallest details. my stomach and heart ached. 

Jeremy Boyd

annalyse! 

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

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. 

Minor Detail

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