![]() ![]() Told from the perspective of an Israeli commander, it takes place over four days in (what became) the Negev desert when a group of soldiers-tasked with “cleans it of any remaining Arabs”-massacres a tribe, takes one of its daughters captive, gang rapes and kills her. The first half of the narrative fictionalizes this incident. However, the chilling fullness of this small event forms the backbone of Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s latest novel, Minor Detail (trans. In light of the infinite array of atrocities, actual and symbolic, perpetrated on the Palestinian people over the better part of a century - forced displacement, occupation, human rights’ abuses, ethnic cleansing, bombings and besiegement - the murder of a lone Arab Bedouin girl in August 1949 hardly warrants attention. ![]() ![]() Coetzee marveled of Adania Shibli’s third novel, she “takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel-the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman-to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators, an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale, but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.” Finalist for the National Book Award, Adania Shibli is one of Arab literature’s prodigious younger talents, and Minor Detail, which was 12 years in the making, is the work she was destined to write. You may not have heard of her until now, but as South African Nobel Laureate J.M. ![]()
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