There are times that books call your name. Some Minor Detail stands out and draws you in. In the case of Adania Shibli’s novel, I’m not sure what it was: it’s a thin volume, a black spine with white text, and completely unassuming on the shelf. Yet, in perusing the collection at The Bookshelf it called to me and when I read the back it was surprisingly contemporaneous. It’s a novel about life under occupation in Palestine with one narrative taking place in 1949 and one a number of years later.
As you can imagine, the book is steeped in controversy.
I’ll first provide a short summary of its reception that I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia. The book was published in Arabic in 2016, but received an English translation in 2020. When the English translation was published, it seemed to be met with a slew of positive reviews. Shibli’s novel was the finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and then it was selected for the LiBeratupreis in Germany following a German translation in 2022. Before the Frankfurt Book Fair, the organization LitProm cancelled the awards ceremony, and postponed it to an unspecified date. The rationale was the “war between Israel and Hamas.” There was an outcry from a number of public intellectuals and they wrote an open letter in defence of Palestinian writers. On the other side of the coin, some of the LitProm jurors objected to the book who claimed it was “anti-Israel” and “antisemitic.”
I can see some people objecting to the book as being anti-Israel because the soldiers don’t come across very well. The entire first half of Minor Detail is about Israeli soldiers patrolling the desert a year after 700, 000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. The soldiers come across a group of Bedouins and proceed to slaughter them, leaving only a young teenage girl alive. I’ll allow you the sorrow of your own imagination to determine what this group of soldiers did to her before murdering her, too. So, yes, Israel does not come across particularly well in this work of fiction. Except, well, this happened.
In the second half of the novel, the unnamed Palestinian narrator goes looking for information on the case, compelled to investigate because of the strange parallel that it happened on the same day as her birth, twenty-five years earlier. Readers then witness the lengths she has to go to find information, including obtaining false papers so that she can pass through checkpoints, and eventually, seemingly, being killed by Israeli soldiers on patrol (though the ending of the book does not explicitly state that). Again, it’s not as if events like this have never happened, so to claim that the book is anti-Israel is maybe the case insofar as the realities of Israeli occupation are anti-humanitarian.
As a literary work, I think the content of the book and its style compliment each other beautifully to evoke the oppressive feeling and the dread of living under occupation. There are certain motifs that recur and repeat again and again, making it feel like there is no escape and no alternative. For instance, the book continually refers to white soap suds, crushing insects, sand clinging to grass, the smell of gasoline, dust, bug bites, and so on. Add to that the blazon of place names and maps to see the disorienting and oppressive reality for the central character. As she navigates to a place long-gone, she pulls out a slew of Palestinian maps and Israeli maps and finds them in contradiction. There are long lists of names, past and present, that make the distance feel interminable, even more so since the village she’s seeking has likely been destroyed.
There’s also a sense of anonymity that pervades the text. None of the characters are named, which I find yields simultaneous and diverging effects. For instance, in not naming the girl who is raped and murdered, she is not given the dignity of human life. When the narrator in the second section is described in somewhat parallel terms, the anonymity gives them a sense of affinity—because both are somewhat lacking in their identities, they are more connected (and more than just because of her birth date). As for the Israeli soldiers and the other Israelis the second narrator encounters, their lack of identity seems to imbue them with the cold banality of evil.
The other piece of this is the permeability or non-permeability of borders. The narrator for the second half of the book notes that she has an “inability [...] to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically” (59). That mindset proves infectious. There are descriptions that seem like there’s no border between past and present, and you know rationally that it wouldn’t be possible, and yet… For example, there’s an Israeli man who runs a museum and when the narrator asks him about his past, he talks about finding a girl in the desert when he was a soldier and you know it wouldn’t be him—the time frame doesn’t seem right—but it’s tempting to think that that barrier between identity has been eradicated (especially since they have no names). There’s a barking dog in the first section. There’s a barking dog in the second section. It’s tempting to believe it’s the same dog that has some sort of knowledge of circumstances—but of course, this is impossible unless the dog is a new record holder for age.
Minor Detail trains you to be perceptive to little details, potentially to a disorienting effect. In the same passage about the inability to identify borders, the narrator continues as follows:
[it] leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes. And it is possible, at first glance, to mock this tendency, which could compel someone, after the building next to their office at their new job is bombed, to be more concerned about the dust that was created by the bombing and that landed on their desk than about the killing of the three young men who had barricaded themselves inside, for instance. But despite this, there are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence. (59)
This is one of those “master key” passages that gives you a way of approaching the text. As alluded to above, the second half of the book starts with the narrator going to her new job. She goes to the building for the first time and someone opens a window to prevent it from shattering when the bombs drop. She finds herself irritated by the dust from that building that lands on her hand, and it’s those small obsessions that distracts from the the big picture, as she notes in her narration. She describes the “dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting” as the nuanced, precise attention to detail. While she diminishes their importance, it is also revelatory of an ethical imperative. Consider, for instance, how many young people have been murdered in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet, the narrator is focused on one particular death, one particular girl, and her entire journey is intent on one minor detail.
There’s a convergence of aesthetics and ethics here. In considering the fly shit on the painting, the narrator continues that “There are even art historians who make these same claims. All right, they don’t exactly claim to notice fly shit on a painting, but they do make a point of focusing on the least significant details, not the most significant ones, in order to determine, for example, whether a painting is an original or a copy” (59). There is an interaction between the forest and the trees and their inseparability seems to be the focus here. For the most fundamental issues to be determined (is it an original or a copy?), we can only arrive at that by focusing on the minutiae. “Forgers,” she continues, “pay attention to major, significant details, like the roundness of the subject’s face or the position of the body, and these they reproduce precisely. However, they rarely pay attention to little details like earlobes or fingernails or toenails, which is why they ultimately fail to perfectly replicate the painting” (59). There’s a reading of the world that cares for that which is least significant, paradoxically being the most significant.
Hence, the details of the book are of utmost importance. There are a number of symbols, metaphors, and allegorical readings involved. For instance, the girl’s murder takes place on the narrator’s birthday—as though her death is the ‘birth’ of the second woman. I’m sure there’s a parallel there to how acts of violence give ‘birth’ to their resistance. At the symbolic level, there’s a number of details related to animals and animality. In the first section, there’s a dog that persistently barks (a symbol of conscience? guilt?). There’s also a section where the main soldier is bitten by a bug and his leg becomes increasingly infected and painful. It seems to be symbolic of his own personal guilt and his own loss of humanity. His response to finding bugs in his room is then to crush all of them, going around destroying every one of these nuisances. It’s also telling that when they first come across the girl in the desert after murdering everyone in her group, including their camels, she is described as a beetle.
Another recurring motif is that of sand, and in particular its ability to absorb that which is around it. For instance, there’s a chilling moment after the Bedouins are killed where Shibli lingers on blood in the sand. The sand sucks up the blood and darkens but then it disappears. Later, when the soldier is spraying the girl down, again the water is absorbed into the sand. There’s an implication that the landscape absorbs life; there’s also the implication that the historical landscape of Israel-Palestine comes from the blood of others. In another chilling detail, when the Bedouins are murdered, the camels are killed and there’s a clump of grass with sand still clinging to it. It’s an evocative image, charged with meaning, with layers of being uprooted, of clinging for dear life, and so on.
There are subterranean connections that operate in that image, in particular. Later in the book, the narrator says, “one cannot rule out the possibility of a connection between the two events, or the existence of a hidden link, as one sometimes finds with plants, for instance, like when a clutch of grass is pulled out by the roots, and you think you’ve got rid of it entirely, only for grass of the exact same species to grow back in the same spot a quarter of a century later” (60-61). I find the premise compelling. In a clever narrative technique, the second narrator describes things that we know about that are completely inaccessible to her. She would never have known about the camel clutching the grass, and here she is narrating something inexplicably similar. I think the suggestion here, too, is that the imperative toward eradication is a doomed venture—impossible to fully remove the subterranean links that bring people together across time and space, “trespassing borders once again” (61).
Where the message becomes less obvious is when echoes exist between characters that would have a more unlikely connection. Shibli lingers on the soap suds that whiten the girl’s body when she is being hosed down like an animal. Shibli then provides a scene of the soldier shaving and it lingers once more on the white soap suds on his skin. Why is it that the soldier and his victim are brought into this mysterious identification?
When actively seeking answers and trying to find connection, the second narrator experiences a series of challenges. It’s a halting kind of narrative. There are blockades and heightened tension of her not knowing whether she’ll be able to pass or if some serious harm will befall her. One of the most powerful lines in the book comes from the journey out. She describes driving the car she rented to investigate this half-a-decade-old murder, noting that as she tries to start the engine, “what appears to be a spider begins spinning its threads around me, tightening them into something like a barrier, impenetrable if only because they’re so fragile” (64). The next line is again one of the most crucial “key passages” of the book: “It’s the barrier of fear, fashioned from fear of the barrier” (64).
As the narrator repeatedly notes, she defies barriers—but this can serve as a disadvantage. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator has been driving around all day and ‘spill[s] some gasoline on [her] hands and pants” (92). I felt an immediate dread. Gas—first of all, that potentially flammable material that now coats her—is referenced earlier in the novel in an ominous way. The girl that is murdered smells of gasoline when the soldier first rapes her. The smell is so offensive to him, actually, that he turns his head away. [Sidenote here: this would be a good opportunity to re-read Slavoj Zizek’s Violence, which has a section about how we are willing to accept strangers until we can smell them on the bus.] The girl is also covered in gasoline prior to her death.
For the narrator to be covered in gasoline evokes a terrible dread. Again, it’s the minor details—-the echoes—-that, if you read them, mean the most. The narrator describes being covered in the smell of gasoline racing ahead of her. As she gets closer to the Nirim settlement where these events took place, she seems to be aligned more and more with the girl. There’s then a stilted narration of the route to get there and all the blocks in place that prevent you from getting there in the most direct fashion. As she is increasingly drawn into the past and aligned with the victim from 1949, you can feel the danger increase, which is why the ending of the book feels so ominous. Her investigation into the past is halted when she notices Israeli soldiers and tries to act inconspicuous before being, presumably, shot to death, perhaps in the same location as the former victim.
When paying attention to very minor details, the slight changes seem even more significant. Nowhere is this more emblematic than when dust comes in the window from the bombing and irritates her to a bombing later in the book. In a different context, the following passage appears:
Bombing sounds very different depending on how close one is to the place being bombed, or how far. The rumblings from this shelling aren’t strong at all, and the noise isn’t unsettling; rather, it’s a deep, heavy sound, like a languorous pounding on a massive drum. And the bombs causing it don’t shake the building I’m in, even though the walls are thin and made of light wood; they don’t shatter the glass, even though the windows are closed. And when I get out of bed and open the windows, the room isn’t filled with a thick cloud of shuddersome dust; instead, what sneaks inside is the soft, tender air of dawn. 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 motes of dust from the buildings being bombed. The absence of dust brings an awareness of how profoundly far I am from anything familiar, and how impossible it will be to return. (94)
I have very little to say about this particular quotation, other than the fact that it is representative of Shibli’s distinct style. One reviewer described it as “controlled,” and I think that is actually the perfect description. Every detail matters and gives life. Every detail is a step toward justice.
And it is in the dust that we find our strange closeness. May we cultivate that closeness and overcome together.
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