Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past. Translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail is a fine meditation on war, memory, and erasure a truly haunting example of the novel as resistance that revolves around a 'minor detail' in the bloody history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine: the capture, gangrape, and murder of a Bedouin woman by occupying soldiers on 13. 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. A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Minor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed one year after the War of 1948, which Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement, exile, and refugeedom of more than 700,000 people, and which 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. 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.
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