Minor Detail by Adania Shibli translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (2020)
The dog was still barking when he returned to the camp. He headed straight for the second hut, and as he drew closer it barked even louder. He asked the soldier on guard if everything was all right, and the guard answered yes. Suddenly, the door opened and the girl stepped out, crying and babbling incomprehensible fragments that intertwined with the dog’s ceaseless barking.
And in that moment after dusk, before complete darkness fell, as her mouth released a language different from theirs, the girl became a stranger again, despite how closely she resembled all the soldiers in camp.
Minor Detail is fewer than 200 pages long, and if proof were needed that a work’s ambition, importance and profundity is not dependent on page length, this book is it. I read Minor Detail back-to-back with Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and two more disparate approaches to narrative prose could scarcely be imagined. After Lowry’s furious and incandescent 400-page bender, entering into Shibli’s intensely distilled, chillingly circumscribed world came as a fascinating contrast, not least because it was a reminder of the fact that in writing there are no rules.
Minor Detail is divided into two parts, roughly similar in length. Part 1 takes place in 1949, in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. After helping to secure victory in that war, an Israeli commander leads a small company of soldiers on a series of patrols into the Negev desert, with the aim of establishing territory and flushing out insurgents. While resting in his tent, the unnamed commander is bitten on the thigh by an unseen creature, possibly a spider. Not wanting to admit to weakness, the commander treats the bite himself with antiseptic ointment. Some days later, the company sights and exterminates a group of Bedouin nomads. The single survivor – a girl – is taken prisoner with the intention of returning her to her own people at the next available opportunity.
This is not what transpires, however. Whether his moral disintegration comes as the direct result of septicemia caused by the infected bite or is simply exacerbated by it we are left to decide for ourselves, but the commander’s gradual loss of perspective and humanity is chilling to observe. Part 1 of Minor Detail is a masterclass in economy and precision. The cool, almost dispassionate third-person account of what happens is set in monstrous contrast with the events themselves, with the stark beauty of Shibli’s landscape writing providing still deeper ambiguity.
We are a third of the way through the book before we hear a word of dialogue, and the words the commander speaks are not dialogue as such but a slew of propaganda. At a celebratory meal to mark their victory, the commander speaks of the changes that are coming, the rebirth of the barren land the soldiers occupy. It is only when we come to Part 2 that we see how disastrously those changes have impacted the occupied population:
The road I’d been familiar with until a few years ago was narrow and winding, while this one is quite wide and straight. Walls five metres high have been erected on either side, and behind them are many new buildings, clustered in settlements that hadn’t existed before or were barely visible, while most of the Palestinian villages that used to be here have disappeared. I scan the area with eyes wide open, searching for any trace of these villages and their houses, which were freely scattered like rocks on the hills, and were connected by narrow, meandering roads that slowed at the curves. But it’s in vain.
The second half of the novel is told from the perspective of a Palestinian woman living and working in present-day Ramallah, who happens to read about the war crime committed by the commander and his soldiers in 1949. In contrast with the pared back, almost fastidious objectivity of Part 1, the first-person narrative of Part 2 seems saturated with nervous anxiety, conveyed through constant repetition of phrases and images – many of them already familiar to us from the commander’s section (the howling dog, the smell of petrol, the hose pipe, the spiders, the shivers gripping the narrator’s body in the museum) – and a brittle, almost fractured manner of delivery that allows us to share the narrator’s inner tension:
When a military patrol stops the minibus I take to my new job, and the first thing that appears through the door is the barrel of a gun, I ask the soldier, while stuttering, most likely out of fear, to put it away when he’s talking to me or asking to see my identity card. At which point the soldier starts mocking my stutter, and the passengers around me grumble because I’m overreacting; there’s no need to make things so tense. The soldier isn’t going to shoot at us, and even if he does, my intervention won’t change the course of things, quite the opposite. Yes, I realise all that, just not in the moment, but rather hours, days or even years later.
In Part 1, the emphasis is on clear, chillingly dispassionate description, like a camera focused squarely and impartially on what is happening. In Part 2, we get sideways glimpses, we are asked to look between the cracks, to notice what has been left out, the minor details:
As for the incident mentioned in the article, the fact that the specific detail that piqued my interest was the date on which it occurred was perhaps because there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. And bombing that building is just one example. Even rape. That doesn’t only happen during war, but also in everyday life. Rape, or murder, or sometimes both. I’ve never been preoccupied with incidents like these before. Even this incident in which, according to the article, several people were killed, only began to haunt me because of a detail about one of the victims. To a certain extent, the only unusual thing about this killing, which came as the final act of a gang rape, was that it happened on a morning that would coincide, exactly twenty-five years later, with the morning I was born.
My knowledge of Middle Eastern history is shamefully slight, and there is no way I could or ever would wade into the debate over the political situation in Israel and Palestine, past or present. What I will say is that the question that pursued me most doggedly while I was reading Minor Detail was of how appallingly difficult it would be, for the narrator of Part 2 to bear or ever come to terms with such wholesale erasure of her history and heritage, up to and including the very landscape beneath her feet.
I take the maps I brought with me out of my bag and spread them over the passenger seat and across the steering wheel. Among these maps are those produced by centres for research and political studies, which show the borders of the four Areas, the path of the Wall, the construction of settlements, and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Another map shows Palestine as it was until the year 1948, and another one, given to me by the rental car company and produced by the Israeli ministry of tourism, shows streets and residential areas according to the Israeli government. With shaking fingers, I try to determine my current location on that map. I haven’t gone far.
Perhaps what is most incredible about this book though is that it could be shorn of all details specific to time and place, and still be equally powerful. Minor Detail is a timeless account of oppression, of the imposition of the will of the empowered upon the powerless, of the horror of war, the unequal distribution of peace, the moments of beauty and resilience that prevail in even the darkest of circumstance.
As a crime novel, Minor Detail is as brutally chilling as any you might read. The perfect poise of Shibli’s prose, her dexterous approach to structure, together with the concentrated force of her commitment to the story she is telling make this an unforgettable, essential reading experience. This is a novel about slipping through the cracks, about the revelation of greater truth through minor details. Of the possibility of escape through the force and reach and power of the written word.
For further insights into Shibli’s background and themes, see this excellent interview.
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This has been the tenth edition of Corona Crime Spree, and with the modest easing of lockdown restrictions that came into force here in Scotland on Friday, I was finally able to meet with my mother in her back garden. As an added bonus, the Scottish weather gods have been on our side these past few days and being outdoors has been a joy unto itself. Although my mum and I don’t yet have any firm idea of when we might be able to resume our ‘Morse suppers’, as we enter the eleventh week of lockdown I have decided to make a change to my weekly blog, shifting the emphasis from crime fiction to speculative fiction for a new series of ‘Weird Wednesdays’, beginning next week.
As with Corona Crime Spree, my aim is for these posts to act as a personal diary of my reading experiences during this time, focusing on older texts as well as brand new books and my own meandering ruminations on reading and writing. I’m trying as far as possible not to plan too far ahead, but rather to let one book lead naturally to another, wherever my thoughts, ideas and inclinations happen to lead me.
I’m finding these blogging projects to be a valuable and constructive way of navigating the lockdown and my own personal experience of it. I hope you are all doing well, finding strength of purpose and inspiration in your own reading and writing. Stay safe and keep well, and see you all here next Wednesday for the first Weird Wednesday!