Minor Detail
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Average rating4.4
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.
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When I tell you that the first part of this book is unrelenting, haunting and utterly disturbing I mean it, I'm used to gore and violence as an habitual reader of horror and all manners of awful things, here it's rendered in a most effective way so that the horror lingers at the back of your mind.
The second part isn't quite as powerful but it's a great example of what it's like to live under apartheid and how a small thing can alter the entire course of one's life. It doesn't culminate to its ending so much as meets it violently but not entirely unexpectedly.
It feels almost wrong to even rate this book.
I read/listened to this a couple weeks ago. It devastated me at the time. It devastates me now.
The story is in 2 parts. The first part is from the POV of an Israeli soldier, I don't remember his exact rank, except that he had authority, as he discovers a Bedouin girl. It's based on a real case, and we see the tragic end of this child. I say child because the actual girl seems to have been under 15.
The tone of this first part is very matter of fact. This man is cold, emotionless, fastidious, and regimented, and so this is the way the story is expressed even as atrocities happen. As he allows and participates in atrocities.
The second portion is the story of a Palestinian woman who reads an account of the first part of the story, and realizes this happened on her birthday, albeit a different year. She feels compelled to find out more, even though this involves her going to places forbidden to her by the occupation.
She is not as detached as the man in the first portion, and yet her perspective is not overwrought either. I say this because there's something compelling about the matter-of-fact sharing of all the Palestinian villages that simple have disappeared from the map. That Israeli maps and old maps of the area tell conflicting narratives.
I don't think you can read this erasure of lives, or villages, alongside the almost forgotten incident with the girl, without hearing the voices of so many Palestinians saying this – that the goal now is to literally and metaphorically erase a people from not just maps but from history.
As she explores where the girl was assaulted and murdered, the past echoes in ways she can't know, but the reader does, as as the divide between then and now is thin. A dog shows up in both timeline, and it's left to the reader's imagination if it's somehow, mystically, the same dog connecting the two girls/women. If that dog is somehow a ghost demanding justice, or acknowledgement, for the thing he witnessed.
The ending feels inevitable and packs a punch.
