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A review by sam8834
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
[CW: violence, rape, murder, colonialism]
"The car cuts through the landscape at high speed. The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it. It's been a long time since I've passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right. After a disappearance, that's when the fly returns to hover over the painting."
I can't remember the last time I read a novella that does as much as Minor Detail does. In a way, it's a collection of minor details, taking place over two halves, that coalesce around major themes, like war, colonialism, and violence. The first half is set in 1949, a year after the Nakba (which Israelis refer to as the War of Independence), in which ~700,000 Palestinians were displaced. This part details an Israeli troop's murdering of an entire encampment, capture, rape, and murder of a Palestinian teenager. The second half, set in the present day, follows a woman who discovers this story and becomes a bit obsessed with finding out more, partly because the event occurred exactly 25 years before she was born.
The small details in this symbolize or are layered over the larger war efforts. An Israeli commander has a spider bite that festers, much in the way the troop's hatred spurs them to go from having the teenager work in the kitchen to raping and killing her instead. Her hair is doused in gasoline to combat headlice, while in the present-day narrative, the narrator spills gasoline on herself when filling up her car. The Palestinian girl's life is erased as she is buried in the desert, and again, as the present-day narrator hits roadblock after roadblock when trying to uncover information about her. Hard, as well, not to think of the parallels to western media's erasure of the current genocide taking place in Gaza.
"The car cuts through the landscape at high speed. The road is nearly perfectly straight, but even so, I keep glancing at the Israeli map unfurled across the seat next to me, fearing that I may get lost in the folds of a scene which fills me with a great feeling of alienation, seeing all the changes that have befallen it. It's been a long time since I've passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right. After a disappearance, that's when the fly returns to hover over the painting."
I can't remember the last time I read a novella that does as much as Minor Detail does. In a way, it's a collection of minor details, taking place over two halves, that coalesce around major themes, like war, colonialism, and violence. The first half is set in 1949, a year after the Nakba (which Israelis refer to as the War of Independence), in which ~700,000 Palestinians were displaced. This part details an Israeli troop's murdering of an entire encampment, capture, rape, and murder of a Palestinian teenager. The second half, set in the present day, follows a woman who discovers this story and becomes a bit obsessed with finding out more, partly because the event occurred exactly 25 years before she was born.
The small details in this symbolize or are layered over the larger war efforts. An Israeli commander has a spider bite that festers, much in the way the troop's hatred spurs them to go from having the teenager work in the kitchen to raping and killing her instead. Her hair is doused in gasoline to combat headlice, while in the present-day narrative, the narrator spills gasoline on herself when filling up her car. The Palestinian girl's life is erased as she is buried in the desert, and again, as the present-day narrator hits roadblock after roadblock when trying to uncover information about her. Hard, as well, not to think of the parallels to western media's erasure of the current genocide taking place in Gaza.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Violence, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Rape and Murder