The ongoing expansion of borders means criminalizing those whom the border means to exclude. Shibli’s taut narrative weaves the past and present into a porous web across which the Nakba continues to advance. Upon release in 2020, it was nominated for a National Book Award. Minor Detail is Shibli’s third novel and was written over the span of twelve years. In Minor Detail’s world of shifting borders, the past cannot be simply denied it bleeds into the present at every turn. The maps she has, however, are for villages that no longer exist and for territories that are no longer part of Palestine. The second half begins over half a century later and centers on a female protagonist as she seeks to visit the site where the battalion committed their war crime. The first half concludes with this ongoing denial of spreading rot. This pathological denial takes the form of a venomous and necrotizing spider bite on the commander’s thigh that he attempts to will away.

The battalion is led by a commander who is committed to “cleansing the Negev of enemies” even at the cost of denying how detrimental such ethnic cleansing is to his own well-being.

The first half of the book follows an IDF battalion in 1949, a year after Israel’s War of Independence, as they seek to push the young state’s borders further south, and in the process brutally rape and murder a young Bedouin woman. This novella does not let us forget that the past is always present in minor details and that minutiae can be a matter of life and death. Shibli uses seemingly inconsequential particulars-a dog barking, a child selling candy at a military checkpoint, the bureaucratic nightmare of a Palestinian renting a car-to outline the psychic toll and material conditions of living under the ever-unfolding Nakba. The one hundred five pages of Minor Detail track over half a century of expansion and dispossession wherein Israel’s borders grow via war, illegal settlements, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, and the normalized, quotidian brutal policing of Palestinian lives. Shibli’s sharp prose, however, refuses this static notion of history. In the Anglo-American context, the Nakba (when recognized at all) is presented in mainstream discourse as a singular episode confined to the past. This term means catastrophe in Arabic and describes the Palestinian experience of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which saw over seven hundred thousand people displaced and exiled from their homes. The event that binds the book’s temporal halves is the Nakba. Adania Shibli’s sparse, unnerving, and haunting novella Minor Detail is a story divided in two seemingly distinct acts, past and present.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli