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4.29 AVERAGE
4.29 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
informative
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
finished reading this earlier this month. the writing is fairly straightforward. there's this unnerving feeling that follows you in every page, and an ending that still echoes hauntingly in my mind weeks after reading it. highly recommend ☆
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
I’d been putting off reading this in light of the current events but couldn’t hold off any longer.
The book was written in a such a jarringly matter of fact, no non-sense tone. There was something so chilling about the repetitiveness of what the characters were doing - the soldier with the wound and patrols, the young woman with the driving circles and chewing gum.
The symbolism of the festering bite on the soldier, the howling dogs. I’ll be thinking about them for a while.
I’ve never quite read anything like this. A book that so stubbornly makes no judgments but leaves you, the reader, pointing fingers. Powerful.
The book was written in a such a jarringly matter of fact, no non-sense tone. There was something so chilling about the repetitiveness of what the characters were doing - the soldier with the wound and patrols, the young woman with the driving circles and chewing gum.
The symbolism of the festering bite on the soldier, the howling dogs. I’ll be thinking about them for a while.
I’ve never quite read anything like this. A book that so stubbornly makes no judgments but leaves you, the reader, pointing fingers. Powerful.
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This is a great political novel. What moved me most in this book is how Shibli talks about borders. The second part of the book is narrated by a woman from Ramallah who describes herself as having a pathological “inability to identify borders, even very rational borders, which makes me overreact sometimes, or under act at other times … I end up trespassing even more borders, worse ones than before (pp 82-83).” Yet what I think becomes clear over the course of her narrative is that borders are only maintained with extreme violence - this harks back to the first half of the book, which takes place on an Israeli mission to enforce the new state’s southern border with Egypt - and even those borders are unavoidably permeable. The dust from bombed buildings enters into offices. It is state enforcement of borders, not the narrator’s “condition” of transgressing them, which is abnormal. I loved this extract at pp 149-150, where the narrator hears bombs on Gaza from the Nirim settlement: “I keep listening, my ears trained to the sound of repeated bombings, and I feel a strange closeness with Gaza, as well as a desire to hear the shelling from nearby, and to touch notes of dust from the buildings being bombed.”
Some other reviews seem to find the connections between the first and second parts to be too obvious - I interpreted these connections to be instances of temporal borders being broken down; notwithstanding how challenging it is for the female narrator to learn about the 1948 crime, the past can’t help but make its way into the present.
Some other reviews seem to find the connections between the first and second parts to be too obvious - I interpreted these connections to be instances of temporal borders being broken down; notwithstanding how challenging it is for the female narrator to learn about the 1948 crime, the past can’t help but make its way into the present.
4.5-5/5
tw // mention of rape
Despite being fictional, Minor Detail is nothing short of historical. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone who strives to learn more about Palestine and/or read more Palestinian fiction.
Split into two parts, Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949 - one year after the Nakba - and centers on an Israeli attack on a group of Bedouins in the Negev desert and the rape, murder, and burial of a Palestinian girl through the eyes of an Israeli soldier. The latter half of the novel is told from the perspective of a woman in Ramallah who becomes fascinated with this case and attempts to uncover its details.
While some may take issue with how the back cover inherently spoils most of the events, this didn't ameliorate my emotional reactions, let alone reduce my appreciation of the book. The experience of reading Minor Detail is truly different from merely reading about it.
I've never experienced such physical discomfort from a book until I read the first part of Minor Detail (though I’d say if we’re not uncomfortable, then that’s ultimately the problem). Shibli's matter-of-fact tone, juxtaposed with the execution of ethnic cleansing and rape, profoundly illuminates a pervasive cruelty that is severely undermined and disregarded by most of the world (especially in the West). In addition, the absence of names further hones in on this point, demonstrating this is not an isolated incident within Israeli society but rather a foundational component of it.
The refusal to provide names serves a similar purpose in the second part as well. Here, we are introduced to a woman who is rather desensitized towards the byproducts of occupation and can only accumulate interest in the 1949 case because the date correlates with her birthday. Furthermore, Shibli's stark contrast of the apathy towards war crimes and apathy amid the normalization of these atrocities allows readers to grasp the bigger picture surrounding what is often referred to as the "Israeli-Palestinian" conflict: a power imbalance.
Yet, there are several parallels between both perspectives that seamlessly weave them together; despite the oppressor vs. oppressed dichotomy, I didn't perceive this work as disjointed. Everything about it felt deliberate and cogently executed Shibli's intentions.
tw // mention of rape
Despite being fictional, Minor Detail is nothing short of historical. I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone who strives to learn more about Palestine and/or read more Palestinian fiction.
Split into two parts, Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949 - one year after the Nakba - and centers on an Israeli attack on a group of Bedouins in the Negev desert and the rape, murder, and burial of a Palestinian girl through the eyes of an Israeli soldier. The latter half of the novel is told from the perspective of a woman in Ramallah who becomes fascinated with this case and attempts to uncover its details.
While some may take issue with how the back cover inherently spoils most of the events, this didn't ameliorate my emotional reactions, let alone reduce my appreciation of the book. The experience of reading Minor Detail is truly different from merely reading about it.
I've never experienced such physical discomfort from a book until I read the first part of Minor Detail (though I’d say if we’re not uncomfortable, then that’s ultimately the problem). Shibli's matter-of-fact tone, juxtaposed with the execution of ethnic cleansing and rape, profoundly illuminates a pervasive cruelty that is severely undermined and disregarded by most of the world (especially in the West). In addition, the absence of names further hones in on this point, demonstrating this is not an isolated incident within Israeli society but rather a foundational component of it.
The refusal to provide names serves a similar purpose in the second part as well. Here, we are introduced to a woman who is rather desensitized towards the byproducts of occupation and can only accumulate interest in the 1949 case because the date correlates with her birthday. Furthermore, Shibli's stark contrast of the apathy towards war crimes and apathy amid the normalization of these atrocities allows readers to grasp the bigger picture surrounding what is often referred to as the "Israeli-Palestinian" conflict: a power imbalance.
Yet, there are several parallels between both perspectives that seamlessly weave them together; despite the oppressor vs. oppressed dichotomy, I didn't perceive this work as disjointed. Everything about it felt deliberate and cogently executed Shibli's intentions.
heartbreaking... the layers of minor details in this book is just so depressingly aching. everything - the dog barking, the spiders, the landscape - and ultimately even the palestinian womens lives are just minor details amidst a tragedy the scale of decades long war