![]() ![]() ![]() Shibli delivers this portion of the novel using a third person objective narrator that meticulously relays the officer’s actions in a taut literary style devoid of emotion or personality. His orders are to eradicate Arabs and so-called “infiltrators” along the armistice lines with Egypt. Part 1 of Minor Detail recounts the activities of a nameless Israeli officer whose unit is charged with the ethnic cleansing of the Negev region during the founding days of the nascent Israeli state. From this tragic historical seed Shibli develops a two-part diptych that fictionalizes the events leading up to the crime as well as its reverberations and echoes decades later. This is one of the rare Israeli war crimes whose perpetrators have been prosecuted and punished. In 2003, Ha’aretz published an account of the unit’s rape and murder of a Bedouin girl whose body they buried in the Negev desert. The plot of this spare, haunting novel is loosely based on a real-life war crime that an Israeli officer and his men committed in August of 1949. Elisabeth Jaquette’s remarkable translation released in 2020 by New Directions has been well received - longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and named as a finalist for the National Book Award in translation. ![]() ![]() Much has already been written about Minor Detail, the philosophical novel penned by Palestinian author Adania Shibli, published in Arabic in 2016, and much more will be said now and in years to come. ![]()
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