This spare and haunting novel cuts to the heart of the experience of erasure, dispossession, and life under occupation in Palestine, and reveals the difficulty of piecing together the shards of a narrative concealed by a fragmented history.
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 some 700,000 people. Israeli soldiers attack a group of Bedouins in the Negev desert, killing everyone except a teenage girl. They capture the girl and later raper her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.
Many years later, in the near-present day, a 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 to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.
