Highbrow/Low Commitment Book Club: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

A bimonthly book club for the busy literature lovers featuring titles around 200 pages or less. 

We return in April with Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette (105 pages). A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

Beginning 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. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims is a Palestinian teenager they kill and bury in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular 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. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.