Minor Detail

This is a two-part short novel. The first part is an account of a true story that happened in Al-Naqab desert in southern occupied Palestine in 1949, where a young Bedouin girl was gang-raped and killed by Israeli soldiers. The second part is fictional based in modern-day Palestine, when the 1949 story was revealed, and a Palestinian woman feels compelled to investigate it further.

This book is not a light read by any means.  I was fascinated by the narration style in the first half of the story, being told from the perspective of the head of an Israeli army unit stationed in Al-Naqab in 1949.  Following that, the shift to the perspective of a young Palestinian woman living in Ramallah, who seems to have some kind of obsessive tendencies, was unexpected, but not jarring. The description of the road she was traveling to get from Ramallah to Yafa was so well done that, as someone who has traveled that road tens or maybe even hundreds of times, I could visualize it as I was listening to the book.

I started reading the book without reading the synopsis, so I didn't know what the story was about. During the first half, for a split second, I was wondering if I had misinterpreted the intentions of the soldier, and whether he actually wanted to keep the Bedouin girl safe from his unit. The pain and horror I felt when the rape started happening was overwhelming.I loved the parallels drawn between the two timelines, particularly with the appearance of the dog, and the smell of kerosene. The ending was as perfect as it was heartbreaking. There are few things that can be conveyed with minimal words, and this was one of them.

It's such a “minor detail” in a well-narrated book, but I wished the narrator was better instructed on how to pronounce Arabic names.