She reprises the howling dog, the trees, the hose, the petrol stench. Shibli instead uses a lyrical, intensely sensory mode to describe how we identify with figures from the past, and especially the restless dead. Why does it haunt her? A less skilful writer might have reproduced the lurid details from the press, but those reports relied solely on what the soldiers disclosed.

After passing through several checkpoints, each time growing more terrified that her identity will be discovered, our narrator reaches the site of the murder. Obsessed with a “minor detail” in the account of the atrocity that “will stay with me forever in spite of myself and how hard I try to forget it”, she borrows an identity card, hires a car and packs competing maps of the territory’s changing borders and settlements. This perspective shift reminds us of the continuing violence in Palestine, where our unnamed narrator lives and works with the ceaseless noise of warplanes, shelling, ambulances and military sirens. Her masterstroke is to abruptly change tone, setting part two in the present, where a young woman from Ramallah undertakes her own investigation into the crime. Coetzee’s endorsement might alert us to the tradition in which this exceptional writer is working – except that Shibli breaks new ground. Shibli’s third novel is an unflinching account of violence and dehumanisation, and J.M. In his hut, feverish from an insect bite and compulsively washing, he unravels. From a cool distance we follow the commander as he orders his soldiers to detain the girl, then collectively vote on her fate. Part one unfolds over four days in August, 1949. Shibli reimagines this event from two viewpoints. “On the first night the soldiers abused her,” reported the commander, “and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world.”

In 2003, Israeli newspaper Haaretz used newly unclassified army documents to uncover the crime: “In August 1949 an IDF unit caught a Bedouin girl, held her captive in a Negev outpost, gang-raped her, executed her at the order of the platoon commander and buried her in a shallow grave in the desert.” After a secret trial the commander was jailed and 19 soldiers received light sentences. Palestinian Adania Shibli’s cinematic novel stages a return of the repressed on a national scale by reprising an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in the Negev region in 1949. These details are so subtly embedded in part one of Minor Detail (Text) that when they recur in part two they gain a holographic glow. The Palestinian author’s haunting novel about an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in 1949Ī coiled hose, a howling dog, terebinth trees, soap suds, the smell of petrol on human skin.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli