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Minor Detail is a must read. It is haunting and powerful. Sadly, this is a story that remains relevant and will need to be told until the war in Gaza ends. This novella is two stories set years apart, but connected by the expansion of the Jewish state into Palestinian territory.

Adania Shibli is an extremely talented writer. Part one follows Israeli unnamed soldiers on their patrols to secure territory in Palestine near the Egyption border following WWII. She describes the monotony and mundane days, lulling the reader. The barking of a dog and the continuous battle with the spiders are threaded throughout the narrative. My interpretation is the author is using these two as metaphors for how the Palestinians are viewed or as a way to dehumanize them. I have seen other authors use “bugs� or “dogs� as a way to convey this.

The reader knows horrors are on the horizon and when they arrive it is the atrocities of war that have been reported from every conflict. The rape of a teenager is written in a way that the vulgar act isn’t given in horrific detail detail, but in very subtle haunting descriptions of what is happening around the violation, not the violation itself.

Part two is about a Palestinian woman who reads about the event from part one and feels compelled to find out more based on a minor detail read in a newspaper article. We follow her pilgrimage to the location in order to learn first hand what happened. This is no easy sojourn. The country is divided into sections A, B, and C. She needs to overcome the challenges of getting proper papers/identification and secure a vehicle to get there. Checkpoints are terrifying. Beggars are everywhere.

The reader is immersed in the reality of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. I found it very unsettling and unnerving. And that brings us to the end of part two. The Palestinian woman’s internal conflict intersects with the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. The ending is like so many endings in situations like these - sad, powerful, and haunting.

Thank you to my local, independent bookstore for their display table and weekly email featuring this book with other Women In Translation. I strongly recommend Minor Detail and reading other translated literature.