Hello, friends! Thank you for joining me in this experiment.
This thread is for the discussion of MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli. If you’re still having trouble finding a copy of the book, send me an email!
Please feel free to introduce yourselves below and say something about your interest in this book or in the region. I’m curious, also, if this is the first novel by a Palestinian for any of you.
As I mentioned in my newsletter, the first half of this novel is based on an actual incident: the capture, rape, and murder of a young Bedouin woman by an Israeli commando in 1949. Shibli was apparently inspired by an article that appeared about it in Haaretz in 2003. In the second half, a Palestinian woman in the early 2000s sets out to discover what she can about the murdered woman.
So that those of you who wish to jump in can get started while others may need more time to finish, I’m going to focus this first set of comments on the first half of the novel. I’ll follow up with more when it feels appropriate, probably next week.
The action takes place in August 1949, more than a year after the state of Israel was established. The soldiers’ mission is to “comb the southwest part of the Negev and cleanse it of any remaining Arabs,” as well as “enforcing the new border with Egypt and preventing infiltrators from penetrating it.” (This is precisely the region that Hamas attacked on October 7.) The officer in charge is focused on routine and order: maintaining personal hygiene, shaving, keeping the camp tidy. But on the very first night, his hut is penetrated by a different kind of infiltrator: some kind of poisonous creature, perhaps a scorpion or other insect, which bites him before he can remove it. Over the next few days, the effects of that bite become more and more dramatic, from intense stomach cramps to apparent hallucinations.
One of the most striking aspects of the novel, to me, is the plain, ordinary, repetitive language in which the officer’s actions are described. How did this style affect your ability to perceive and process the scenes of violence—first, when the officer forcibly undresses the girl and hoses her down; and later, the rape?
Another scene I find deeply affecting is the cutting of the girl’s hair—described, quite rationally, as a measure to prevent lice from spreading, but in fact an act of brutality. Notice also that earlier in this scene, when the girl is dressed in the soldiers’ clothing, she is indistinguishable from them, except for her hair; a few pages later, with her hair gone, only the “incomprehensible fragments” of her language make her “a stranger” to them.
The officer gives a speech congratulating the soldiers for their success and exhorting them to further protect the territory, taking as their philosophy, “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.” He continues:
“We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long…. It is here, in particular, that our creativity and innovation will be tested, once we succeed in turning the Negev into a flourishing, civilized region and a thriving center of learning, development, and culture, as we have done in the northern and central regions.”
As we know, that area would in fact absorb thousands of Jews, many of them refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe or from Arab countries where they were also the targets of persecution and violence. In the latter half of the novel, the protagonist will visit a kibbutz apparently built on the location of this former outpost; the question of whether the land was as “barren” as the officer depicts it will also be raised. What is your reaction to the officer’s speech—particularly in the context of current events? How do you think the novel intends for us to understand it?
The officer rapes the girl after a sleepless night in which he continues to suffer the effects of the bite and is overcome by the “strong tangy smell” emanating from the girl. How do we understand his mental and physical state? Why do you think the girl’s smell is described so often and so graphically?
One last note and then I’ll turn it over to you. The incident that inspired the novel is an established event—as we know from Haaretz, twenty members of the platoon were sent to prison for their involvement in it. My own understanding is that rape was not among the IDF’s normal tactics. (This doesn’t, of course, excuse it in any way.) Does the choice of such an incident as the subject for a novel predispose readers to assume that it was typical? What, if any, is the novelist’s responsibility to offer context?
I look forward to your thoughts on any of these questions—or on other aspects of the novel I’ve neglected to mention.
Hello all! This is one of many novels by Palestinians I’ve read. Perhaps my favorites are I Saw Ramallah by Morrid Barghouti and Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. I’ve traveled to Palestine three times in the last twenty years. I was an author at PalFest, a literary festival that roams the West Bank. I was hosted by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman on journeys through Palestine guided by IDF veterans who formed Breaking the Silence and contributed an essay to their edited collection Kingdom of Olives & Ash on the 50th anniversary of the Occupation. I look forward immensely to hearing all your thoughts and ideas.
The contrast between the two sections of "Minor Detail" is stark. In the first episode, there's no interiority. The characters are portrayed in mechanical terms, though their actions. There is neither thought nor emotion. The most extreme case of this is that the main character, the officer, sustains a serious and painful injury but neither seeks treatment from the platoon's medic nor tells anyone else about it. The only communication between characters is that of orders and responses to orders and the incomprehensible screams and speech of the Bedouin girl.
From my own experience, I can confirm that this is an accurate portrayal of how soldiers sometimes function under stress. (It also accords with the testimony of some survivors of the Nazi death camps.) These soldiers are far from home and from anything resembling home, facing an amorphous threat, in the immediate aftermath of a bloody war in which a huge number of Israeli soldiers died. Even after the war, the threat of invasion and incursions remained; the borders, including the one with the Gaza Strip, were marked on maps but not in the field. They were porous and easily crossed. Tens and later hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world were streaming into the new state. One way soldiers and civilians coped with this pressure, then and today, was to dehumanize the Arabs. The Bedouin were especially easy to dehumanize as they seemed primitive, ignorant, and unrooted.
Shibli portrays the rape in mechanical terms as well. It's almost instinctual in the case of the officer. There's no sign of sexual attraction; the rot in his leg becomes a metaphor for the rot of his moral compass. Despite earlier warning his soldiers against touching the girl (it's not clear, because we can't hear his voice, whether his simply reciting boilerplate orders or speaking with real conviction), he abuses her himself, but not for pleasure but rather in an almost ritual fashion.
It's perhaps surprising to see a Palestinian author writing about such a horrifying incident in a way that avoids attributing moral agency to the perpetrators. If they are automatons, acting purely on instinct, can they be held responsible?
The second episode is all interiority. We have only the thoughts and feelings of the woman who goes on a quest to find the site of the crime. But here, too, there is a limit to self-knowledge. She tells us that she does not know why she is compelled to make this trip, or what she hopes to discover, and how that might change anything in her life or the world. She portrays for us the impositions of the occupation, the fear of encountering soldiers, the strangeness of the different world she enters when she crosses into Israel, where the vestiges of the world prior to 1948 are barely visible. But it's all portrayed as simply the way life is; she makes no accusations, offers no alternative. She's treated respectfully, even generously, by the Israelis she meets. True, she gives a false name and doesn't say she's a Palestinian, but her Arab identity would almost certainly be obvious to the Israelis she talks to, from her speech, her dress, and her mannerisms. What she discovers is the fluidity of the landscape; settlements move around, people are mobile, the past itself is unstable.
The final scene caught be by surprise but in fact ties the two halves of the story together. She enters what she knows is a military area. Up to this point she has been trying to avoid soldiers, but this time she almost seeks them out. Her death is as mechanical as that of the Bedouin girl; she reaches into her pocket for gum, but the soldiers think she is reaching for a weapon and shoot her, as they must do under the circumstances, to protect themselves.
The book resonates with the current war, which seems to many of us in Israel also as almost the mechanical, inevitable result of Israel's need to defend itself against enemies who seek to destroy it. The difference is that the current war is replete with emotion and suffering, both in Israel and among the Gazans, and that on both sides those emotions are being expressed vocally. Such outpourings of emotion may perhaps offer an opening for mutual empathy, but they also push the animosity between the two sides to extremes. Shibli offers us no hope. But she accurately portrays how it feels to be in the midst of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not politically or emotionally, but in the embodied sense of its effect on us as physical objects making our way through a threatening world.
Hi everyone! it looks like copies are now available on bookshop.org. New Directions tells me that they have restocked, so if you're still holding out for a paper copy, they are coming!
This is I think my first novel by a Palestinian. I was gripped from the first sentence, "Nothing moved except the mirage." Then the language of simple descriptions of mechanical movements, with little if any interiority except irritation about heat, cold, swelling from wound, muscle pains. And the brutality of the washing of the girl and then the attack, so much harsher described this way. The continual scanning of a foreign environment for dangerous elements, and the way that activity infects oneself. I kept thinking about a passage in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams about what happens when we view a landscape as "empty" or barren simply because we don't understand it. The officer's language about the Arab's approach to the Negev as sterile, barren, and neglected, while they will turn it into a creative, thriving, place filled my head as I thought about him watering the girl forcefully, even brutally, and then of course depositing his fluids in her. I really marvel at Shibli's incredible restraint and exquisite selectivity of language in this first half.
I am looking forward to the second half, and reading more of your comments. --Vicki
Hi! This is my first book by a Palestinian author for me. I mostly read mystery, horror, and science fiction so this book club is a little different for me!
I am Jewish (secular, if that is the right word), and I visited Israel 20 years ago with my grandparents. While there, we visited relatives who lived on a “peace kibbutz,” a community of Jewish and Palestinian families. Children were taught both Arabic and Hebrew. But the goal was not assimilation. Rather , the goal (I think) was trying to humanize the conflict for the next generation.
I always thought that community was interesting, and so since October 7th I have been seeking out books and films about the region from different voices.
I believe this is the first novel I have read by a Palestinian. I am not quite finished, but finding it fascinating. Shibli's style has a harsh lyricism and hypnotic quality. I am listening to it (and waiting on the book to come in). Meanwhile, I have learned a lot from Ruth's post and all the comments here. Thank you!
I too was struck by the lack of interiority in the first half. Cinematic was how I perceived it at first, though as it progresses, the officer's physical suffering does make this a claustrophobic chamber of one, even though we aren't getting his thoughts. We also get the images that are haunting him from the massacre of the girl's companions (and the camels), but again without his reaction to them. I felt he was slipping into madness. I also thought he was not going to live long--the poison seemed to be having a systemic effect--and wondered if he knew it. He hardly seems aware of what he's doing when he rapes her, but when he "discovers" his own act, his impulse is to kill her, as if to wipe it away, so that horror compounds horror here.
I have not yet finished the book, but after writing the above I read the Haaretz article. I figured the bite and the poison were authorial creation, but wanted to see how the novel compared with the facts. I wonder why she gives the officer this physical torment. It might be that it’s symbolic of the rot of his moral compass, as Haim Watzman suggests, and it does make this taut from the very beginning. But it also disconnects him from his actions in a sense. It may be that his madness, induced by poison, is symbolic of the madness of violence and war, which poisons and severs people from their humanity. Also, reading the article made me think I misinterpreted the officer’s words in the novel at the end of the soldiers’ party. I thought he offered them the possibility of having their way with the girl only to yank it back in disgust and warn them against doing any such thing at risk of being shot. But the article suggests he just wanted them to keep to the order he had established for abusing her. Finally, I was under the impression they shot all the Bedouins except the girl, and that may be the case in the book. The article, however, has them shooting only one and scaring the others away but then later killing the camels they discover. In neither case are any weapons found, but in the novel they shoot before ascertaining this fact. Finally, the shooting of the girl is horrific and Shibli seems chillingly faithful to the facts here, but she leaves out Moshe’s frightful words, “I saw fit to remove her from the world.” The act itself seems to be saying just that.
Hi all, I’m really cautious to give a comment because I’m not a huge reader of literature so don’t feel qualified, but I’m well on the way to conversion to become a Jew, have been reading a lot about the history of the region and the conflict and so wanted to join in with this.
I finished the book this morning. I was impressed by the first half in how it very matter-of-factly describes the events while also really evoking the environment with its attention to detail. And in the second half that same attention drew me in (I was particularly moved by the description of the dust from a bomb on the paper). I think the second half clearly lets us know what it’s like to have to deal with the human (Israel)-made environment that the Palestinian protagonist has to negotiate; what it’s like to live in the West Bank and all the restrictions on movement. What I didn’t understand—and this is why I don’t feel qualified to comment(!)—is why there was so much connection between the experiences/details of the protagonist in part 2 and the officer in part 1: the spiders/dots, the gasoline, the driving of a vehicle etc. I honestly couldn’t work out what I was supposed to think... I’d love some help with that!
Finally, I understand the novel was first written in Arabic, then translated into German and English, so I was wondering who is it written for? I would have thought that the readers of the original would be familiar with those sorts of descriptions of both the horrific event in part one and the environment in part two, so I’m left wondering if it would be interesting to those readers (or rather how it would be interesting).
To answer one of Ruth’s questions, I *do* think that we’re supposed to be left with the impression that rape was quite common, although perhaps the officer’s commands to the junior soldiers not to touch the girl (before he’s completely delirious) mitigate that?
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Hello, Ruth and group! I skipped to the comments because I am only about 1/4 through. I borrowed the audiobook on the Libby app--a great resource that often offers books in a variety of forms. I'm not usually an audiobook person, but it's what was free.
One of the reasons I'm not an audio person is that I can't go back and re read and mull over meaning. And the material is so soaked in trauma that I don't want to go back and re listen to it.
I just passed the segment where the officer takes the girl into his hut, ostensibly to protect her, but instead in something of a fever/fugue state actually rapes her, as I interpret the squeaking of the bed and the dogs behavior.
The writing is spare and powerful. I'm often recoiling or grimacing as I listen. I am musing on why the author chose to pull the punch on the rape by not making it a conscious choice, and how she might even be offering the reader the option to choose to not believe a rape happened, even as a physical assault is made clear. But I'm just past this episode, so don't have further context yet.
Edited to add: I read Haunting of Hill House with Ruth and A Public Space earlier this year, and am reading and writing from Minneapolis.
waiting for my copy on hold at LAPL. look forward to the discussion. So important to read Palestinian writers now and I so appreciate your starting this discussion!
I was surprised at how detached I felt from all the characters in Part One. The violent rape and water hose scenes were difficult for me to read, but I felt like it was happening very far away (maybe because of the lack of dialogue or the way it was described). I was not emotionally invested.
I thought it was interesting that in Part One the author put more emphasis on the dog — the dog’s dialogue (the howling, barking, panting, etc.) and the dog’s emotional state.
And I thought there was a parallel between the rape scene where the girl bites the officer and the last scene in Part One where the officer grips the dog’s muzzle. I thought the description of the girl’s saliva was meant to dehumanize. Whereas, I don’t think the dog is ever described as having any saliva, drool, or smell in Part One.
I thought this was a good lesson on perspective. And maybe a way to make the reader think about humanizing/dehumanizing narratives. (I was so relieved that the dog was spared. And then I felt guilty that I cared so much about the dog.)
Part Two was the opposite for me. I was completely invested in the girl, her road trip, and search for answers. And though there was little description of violence, I very much felt that I was there for the shooting. And that scene stayed with me.
The dogs that kept popping up in Part Two seemed more secondary to me and far off in the distance.
I found it very interesting that in Part One the girl is introduced to us as a “black mass” and in Part Two it is the dog who is introduced as a “black mass.”
The other thing that is striking to me is how many of the characters seem (as someone already said) to be acting on instinct. In Part Two, I felt that the girl is possessed by something, maybe the spirit of the girl in Part One. In any event, it feels as if the girl in Part Two lacks free will (for example, eating the chewing gum). Maybe this feeling of possession is a sort of a physical representation of being occupied.
Thank you for starting this group, Ruth. I've read very little by Palestinian writers, mainly Mahmoud Darwish.
This book has been haunting me since I finished it a week ago. For me, the marked exteriority of the first section elevated it to the level of allegory. Shibli both effectively addresses acts of violence perpetrated against women in all wars and the impossibility of those on either side of intractable conflicts to know and recognize each other as fully human. The extreme interiority of the second section nicely contrasts with the flatness of the characters in the first, and emphasizes the journalist-narrator's inability to understand her own motivations and responses. She is driven to uncover the "truth" of the Bedouin girl's experience because of the minor detail of the coincidence of the murder of the girl occurring twenty-five years to the day before she was born. And no matter how many other "minor details" she focusses on--the smell of gasoline, the barking dog, the dust from the explosion, the shell casing found on the sand--she gets no closer to understanding the truth of the girl's experience or her own. (Calling the narrator autistic is completely off, she has been living with the direct and indirect stresses of occupation for years. It's not surprising she has developed coping mechanisms.)
At first, I thought the parallel Shibli draws between the officer eradicating the insects in his tent and the soldiers clearing the desert was too obvious, but after the murder of the Bedouins and finally the girl and the slaughter of the camels, I found it justified in the context of this novella.
It's a harrowing book, but one that I think does deepen our understanding of the current conflict, its history and its repercussions.
I finished the book in one reading today, finally after too many obligations kept me from it. This reads to me more like a fable than a novella. The characters aren’t rounded, or knowable, and we’re only allowed into the heads of two of them--the officer in the first half and the woman in search of the truth about the rape/murder in the second half. The hallmark of the novel is getting inside a character’s head utterly. Another aspect missing here is any previous history of these two characters. We have no idea about their families, their backgrounds, their personalities even, beyond the most rudimentary depiction. The officer is obsessed with cleanliness. The woman is fearful. Obviously this failure by the author to imagine them more fully is intentional. it mirrors the officer’s inability to imagine the humanity of the Bedouin girl. And it mirrors the woman “investigator’s inability “to uncover the incident as experienced by the girl.” Yet the author could have imagined the incident from the Bedouin’s girl’s inner perspective, that’s what novelists do. Shibli’s refusal reminds me of the sensations I get when I visit Israel and Occupied Palestine, of an intractability, an implacable stoniness governed by a relentless sun.
Thank you for focussing your writing here like this. AND for your bio of Shirley Jackson: magnificent!
Personally, it stopped a bit abruptly for me; I’d liked to have learned how her husband (and kids) handled her unsurprising and way-too early death from bad health in the short run. She had been the linchpin of that family.
Dec 8, 2023·edited Dec 8, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Hi Ruth, I do not have this book, but I find your email very interesting. I thought I would shed some light that could contribute to the discussion amongst your readers. I understand and have heard that in the Jewish religion, it is acknowledged that rape can take place, it is after all a common form of conquering others. However, and this is what I have found fascinating, men are told that if they do rape, they must shave the head of their victim and take her as a wife. It would seem that what went on at that time was done haphazardly. Of course we know that none of it is acceptable, but perhaps the offender was misguided.
Please understand that my comment does not reflect my opinions in any way. It is just something I have heard and found interesting.
Litprom, the organization that grants the LiBeraturpreis, has issued a public apology to Adiana Shibli--3 months after their decision to move the ceremony from the Frankfurt Book Fair. Better than nothing, I suppose, but still, too little, too late, especially since they do not offer any concrete suggestions for an award ceremony. https://www.litprom.de/beste-bücher/liberaturpreis/preisträgerin-2023/
I just listened to this marvelous interview with Shibli, and learned a great deal, and came away totally impressed by her: https://tinhouse.com/?s=adania+shibli
Dec 28, 2023·edited Dec 30, 2023Liked by Ruth Franklin
Hello everyone. I finished the book last night and have enjoyed reading your comments. I have fairly little to add. Just a few things. One is that I'm mystified by Coetzee's blurb, referring to "two profoundly self-absorbed narrators--an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale." Leaving the latter aside, which "narrator" is he referring to in the first half?
If Coetzee thinks the officer is "a psychopath," why does he call him a narrator? And how is he a psychopath? Calling him that almost seems to let him off the hook. (How carefully did JMC read the book??)
The bite comes from an unknown "creature"; later, the officer goes on a rampage against the innocent arachnids and insects in his hut. This seems allegorical to me: punish the innocents for the wound inflicted by an ill-discerned enemy.
I agree with Ruth that the smell he attributes to the girl is likely the smell of his own wound. And agree with others that it is a moral stench.
But why the whole addition of the bite and the soldier's days of wandering, his stoic determination to stay upright even when something is undermining him from within? I still don't know what all this "means," just know that it has a powerful, even hypnotic effect on the reader.
I'm struck by how little comment there has been on the dog. There is an ur-dog followed by a number of dogs, most of which howl. I found this motif both powerful and elusive.
Also the camels: Shibli makes the animals "mute" (in the sense of lacking human language) but eloquent witnesses as well as victims to the same violence the soldiers inflict on the Bedouins. I have been tracking the depiction of animals in literary texts for some years now; increasingly also writers are paying attention to animals as subjects in the environment, kin to you and me just as alien "others" are actually kin to you and me.
Ultimately, everyone in the story seems to be half-hypnotized. As if war, and before it, the construction of "the enemy," deprived people of mental clarity, even volition.
I am not entirely sure that I "like" the ending. It seems a little . . . cheap?
And yet the novella is a small tour de force, haunting and original.
I wonder if Shibli was at all influenced by Camus' The Stranger. Also--not necessarily an influence on Shibli--but another novel I'm currently reading, History, by Elsa Morante, depicts its main character as a combination of terrorized and canny, a damaged and lonely woman who must contend alone with a hostile world--and the inciting incident in this novel is rape committed by a soldier.
Are there any interviews with Shibli available online?
Ruth, thank you so much for launching this group. I have admired your criticism for years.
I finished listening to Minor Detail today. What a strange, upsetting book.
I found the contrast between the extreme exteriority of the first part and the interiority of the second interesting. The first part w the soldiers is cinematic and reminded me of Claire Denis' film Beau Travail. I agree that the wound is a metaphor, however inexact.
I read the narrator of part 2 as neurodivergent. The way she described her life, her habits, and interactions w others all had hallmarks of neurodivergence (autism and OCD specifically) to me. I didn't find this an impediment to me experiencing her as a complex character.
I wrote a longish comment earlier and was unable to post it, so this is a brief test. I'm enjoying this conversation enormously and am grateful to Professor Franklin for initiating this marvelous reading project. This is the first novel I've read by a Palestinian novelist. I'm an English professor and am considering writing on this novel. I'll say more if I'm able to post this. best, Sheila Teahan
Hi from New Mexico. Apologies for these disconnected comments. First-the washing. I don’t recall how many times Moshe fills his cup with water, washes his body and then dumps the water (and rinses and hangs towel to dry)-but as it is one of the first things he does, it suggests to me the connection between cleanliness and order and the idea of the officer, and by extension, his platoon, and their primitive camp as not belonging there, claiming ownership of a place that is not his or theirs.
And then a couple of Heart of Darkness moments: descriptions of the girl as a curled up ‘black mass,’ her black hair and her ‘right breast’ and her screaming, not so dissimilar from Marlow’s/Conrad’s references to African black bodies and limbs, and to the howling of Kurtz’s mistress. The identity of the native as a sum of physical body parts and a voice without comprehensible words. Also the absurdity of daily patrols through an illusive landscape of endless dunes and the forbidding sun always forcing the soldiers under too little shade. That the Negev (where I lived for a year) is a deceptive mirage as is Conrad’s jungle wrapped in fog - both perhaps conveying a place that the foreigner should not penetrate, though he does anyway and in brutal ways. And of course the only direct words we hear is Moshe’s clipped lecture on claiming and civilizing the desert; he’s like a parody of himself—the narrator’s(and Shibli’s?) narrative of Zionist aspirations. Still thinking about the novel’s end but that’s enough scattered thoughts for now.
Thank you Ruth. I have read Susan Abulhawa, Ghassan Kanafani, and Sayed Kashua. I love the opportunity to listen to and learn from both Palestinian and Israeli literary voices, even when, as in this case, they leave me upset and with little hope.
I'm waiting to reread the novel until I receive my hard copy, so just a few brief comments. The novel is fascinating for its use of what has traditionally been called point of view--or in narratology, focalization. The limited third person narration of the first section is brilliant and harrowing, as others have commented. That section proceeds through a relentless and terrifying accretion of "minor detail" (the novel's title is clearly ironic) culminating in the assault on the girl. I, too, have been puzzling over the implications of the bite. As others have commented, the officer's hallucinatory state helps explain his attack, and the bite is also clearly tropological. It seems to important a psychic wound of a kind that renders his rape and murder of the girl a species of compensation for an emasculating trauma. The psychic dimension of the wound helps account for his secrecy about it, and for the sense in which he is actively cultivating the infection effected by the bite. It becomes a cause in its own right.
Thank you so much, Ruth, for bringing this book to our attention. It was a very hard read but I'm so glad to have done so. And Dan, if you're here on this Substack, thank you for writing about your amazing class. I wish all my students could take a class like that. That is the epitome of what liberal education should be.
I have to say I stumbled on the word "cleanse" in the opening scene, where the Israeli platoon is said to be "cleansing the Negev of enemies." I'd love to know if that's the word Israelis used in those days (since the phrase "ethnic cleansing" was only coined in the 1990s). The pattern of images of clean/dirty are very resonant. There is also the religious connotation of ritual cleansing which has clear moral and physical implications.
I also wrestled with your question about whether the novelist has a responsibility to offer context. It would be quite easy to read this novel as confirming a view that all Israeli soldiers/all Israelis are monsters (the impassive third person point of view notwithstanding). I guess I would say that responsibility must be the reader's, not the writer's. Or not only the writer's. Here you could say the second half of the novel is also "context."
I think the most powerful aspect of the novel is the way it shows how random and meaningless are the arbitrary "borders" men impose upon the landscape, which is nothing more than sand and dirt. The distinction between cleanliness and filth being another kind of border.
Wanted to draw all of your attention to this piece in Slate by my friend Dan Torday, about teaching Minor Detail this fall. I'm hoping he'll pop in on our discussion! https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/12/minor-detail-palestine-novel-campus-free-speech.html
Hello all! This is one of many novels by Palestinians I’ve read. Perhaps my favorites are I Saw Ramallah by Morrid Barghouti and Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. I’ve traveled to Palestine three times in the last twenty years. I was an author at PalFest, a literary festival that roams the West Bank. I was hosted by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman on journeys through Palestine guided by IDF veterans who formed Breaking the Silence and contributed an essay to their edited collection Kingdom of Olives & Ash on the 50th anniversary of the Occupation. I look forward immensely to hearing all your thoughts and ideas.
The contrast between the two sections of "Minor Detail" is stark. In the first episode, there's no interiority. The characters are portrayed in mechanical terms, though their actions. There is neither thought nor emotion. The most extreme case of this is that the main character, the officer, sustains a serious and painful injury but neither seeks treatment from the platoon's medic nor tells anyone else about it. The only communication between characters is that of orders and responses to orders and the incomprehensible screams and speech of the Bedouin girl.
From my own experience, I can confirm that this is an accurate portrayal of how soldiers sometimes function under stress. (It also accords with the testimony of some survivors of the Nazi death camps.) These soldiers are far from home and from anything resembling home, facing an amorphous threat, in the immediate aftermath of a bloody war in which a huge number of Israeli soldiers died. Even after the war, the threat of invasion and incursions remained; the borders, including the one with the Gaza Strip, were marked on maps but not in the field. They were porous and easily crossed. Tens and later hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world were streaming into the new state. One way soldiers and civilians coped with this pressure, then and today, was to dehumanize the Arabs. The Bedouin were especially easy to dehumanize as they seemed primitive, ignorant, and unrooted.
Shibli portrays the rape in mechanical terms as well. It's almost instinctual in the case of the officer. There's no sign of sexual attraction; the rot in his leg becomes a metaphor for the rot of his moral compass. Despite earlier warning his soldiers against touching the girl (it's not clear, because we can't hear his voice, whether his simply reciting boilerplate orders or speaking with real conviction), he abuses her himself, but not for pleasure but rather in an almost ritual fashion.
It's perhaps surprising to see a Palestinian author writing about such a horrifying incident in a way that avoids attributing moral agency to the perpetrators. If they are automatons, acting purely on instinct, can they be held responsible?
The second episode is all interiority. We have only the thoughts and feelings of the woman who goes on a quest to find the site of the crime. But here, too, there is a limit to self-knowledge. She tells us that she does not know why she is compelled to make this trip, or what she hopes to discover, and how that might change anything in her life or the world. She portrays for us the impositions of the occupation, the fear of encountering soldiers, the strangeness of the different world she enters when she crosses into Israel, where the vestiges of the world prior to 1948 are barely visible. But it's all portrayed as simply the way life is; she makes no accusations, offers no alternative. She's treated respectfully, even generously, by the Israelis she meets. True, she gives a false name and doesn't say she's a Palestinian, but her Arab identity would almost certainly be obvious to the Israelis she talks to, from her speech, her dress, and her mannerisms. What she discovers is the fluidity of the landscape; settlements move around, people are mobile, the past itself is unstable.
The final scene caught be by surprise but in fact ties the two halves of the story together. She enters what she knows is a military area. Up to this point she has been trying to avoid soldiers, but this time she almost seeks them out. Her death is as mechanical as that of the Bedouin girl; she reaches into her pocket for gum, but the soldiers think she is reaching for a weapon and shoot her, as they must do under the circumstances, to protect themselves.
The book resonates with the current war, which seems to many of us in Israel also as almost the mechanical, inevitable result of Israel's need to defend itself against enemies who seek to destroy it. The difference is that the current war is replete with emotion and suffering, both in Israel and among the Gazans, and that on both sides those emotions are being expressed vocally. Such outpourings of emotion may perhaps offer an opening for mutual empathy, but they also push the animosity between the two sides to extremes. Shibli offers us no hope. But she accurately portrays how it feels to be in the midst of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not politically or emotionally, but in the embodied sense of its effect on us as physical objects making our way through a threatening world.
Hi everyone! it looks like copies are now available on bookshop.org. New Directions tells me that they have restocked, so if you're still holding out for a paper copy, they are coming!
Hi, everyone,
This is I think my first novel by a Palestinian. I was gripped from the first sentence, "Nothing moved except the mirage." Then the language of simple descriptions of mechanical movements, with little if any interiority except irritation about heat, cold, swelling from wound, muscle pains. And the brutality of the washing of the girl and then the attack, so much harsher described this way. The continual scanning of a foreign environment for dangerous elements, and the way that activity infects oneself. I kept thinking about a passage in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams about what happens when we view a landscape as "empty" or barren simply because we don't understand it. The officer's language about the Arab's approach to the Negev as sterile, barren, and neglected, while they will turn it into a creative, thriving, place filled my head as I thought about him watering the girl forcefully, even brutally, and then of course depositing his fluids in her. I really marvel at Shibli's incredible restraint and exquisite selectivity of language in this first half.
I am looking forward to the second half, and reading more of your comments. --Vicki
I am waiting for my copy but so glad you are doing this!
Hi! This is my first book by a Palestinian author for me. I mostly read mystery, horror, and science fiction so this book club is a little different for me!
I am Jewish (secular, if that is the right word), and I visited Israel 20 years ago with my grandparents. While there, we visited relatives who lived on a “peace kibbutz,” a community of Jewish and Palestinian families. Children were taught both Arabic and Hebrew. But the goal was not assimilation. Rather , the goal (I think) was trying to humanize the conflict for the next generation.
I always thought that community was interesting, and so since October 7th I have been seeking out books and films about the region from different voices.
Your Instagram post was a welcome post to see!
I believe this is the first novel I have read by a Palestinian. I am not quite finished, but finding it fascinating. Shibli's style has a harsh lyricism and hypnotic quality. I am listening to it (and waiting on the book to come in). Meanwhile, I have learned a lot from Ruth's post and all the comments here. Thank you!
I too was struck by the lack of interiority in the first half. Cinematic was how I perceived it at first, though as it progresses, the officer's physical suffering does make this a claustrophobic chamber of one, even though we aren't getting his thoughts. We also get the images that are haunting him from the massacre of the girl's companions (and the camels), but again without his reaction to them. I felt he was slipping into madness. I also thought he was not going to live long--the poison seemed to be having a systemic effect--and wondered if he knew it. He hardly seems aware of what he's doing when he rapes her, but when he "discovers" his own act, his impulse is to kill her, as if to wipe it away, so that horror compounds horror here.
I have not yet finished the book, but after writing the above I read the Haaretz article. I figured the bite and the poison were authorial creation, but wanted to see how the novel compared with the facts. I wonder why she gives the officer this physical torment. It might be that it’s symbolic of the rot of his moral compass, as Haim Watzman suggests, and it does make this taut from the very beginning. But it also disconnects him from his actions in a sense. It may be that his madness, induced by poison, is symbolic of the madness of violence and war, which poisons and severs people from their humanity. Also, reading the article made me think I misinterpreted the officer’s words in the novel at the end of the soldiers’ party. I thought he offered them the possibility of having their way with the girl only to yank it back in disgust and warn them against doing any such thing at risk of being shot. But the article suggests he just wanted them to keep to the order he had established for abusing her. Finally, I was under the impression they shot all the Bedouins except the girl, and that may be the case in the book. The article, however, has them shooting only one and scaring the others away but then later killing the camels they discover. In neither case are any weapons found, but in the novel they shoot before ascertaining this fact. Finally, the shooting of the girl is horrific and Shibli seems chillingly faithful to the facts here, but she leaves out Moshe’s frightful words, “I saw fit to remove her from the world.” The act itself seems to be saying just that.
Hi all, I’m really cautious to give a comment because I’m not a huge reader of literature so don’t feel qualified, but I’m well on the way to conversion to become a Jew, have been reading a lot about the history of the region and the conflict and so wanted to join in with this.
I finished the book this morning. I was impressed by the first half in how it very matter-of-factly describes the events while also really evoking the environment with its attention to detail. And in the second half that same attention drew me in (I was particularly moved by the description of the dust from a bomb on the paper). I think the second half clearly lets us know what it’s like to have to deal with the human (Israel)-made environment that the Palestinian protagonist has to negotiate; what it’s like to live in the West Bank and all the restrictions on movement. What I didn’t understand—and this is why I don’t feel qualified to comment(!)—is why there was so much connection between the experiences/details of the protagonist in part 2 and the officer in part 1: the spiders/dots, the gasoline, the driving of a vehicle etc. I honestly couldn’t work out what I was supposed to think... I’d love some help with that!
Finally, I understand the novel was first written in Arabic, then translated into German and English, so I was wondering who is it written for? I would have thought that the readers of the original would be familiar with those sorts of descriptions of both the horrific event in part one and the environment in part two, so I’m left wondering if it would be interesting to those readers (or rather how it would be interesting).
To answer one of Ruth’s questions, I *do* think that we’re supposed to be left with the impression that rape was quite common, although perhaps the officer’s commands to the junior soldiers not to touch the girl (before he’s completely delirious) mitigate that?
Nice to meet you all!
Hello, Ruth and group! I skipped to the comments because I am only about 1/4 through. I borrowed the audiobook on the Libby app--a great resource that often offers books in a variety of forms. I'm not usually an audiobook person, but it's what was free.
One of the reasons I'm not an audio person is that I can't go back and re read and mull over meaning. And the material is so soaked in trauma that I don't want to go back and re listen to it.
I just passed the segment where the officer takes the girl into his hut, ostensibly to protect her, but instead in something of a fever/fugue state actually rapes her, as I interpret the squeaking of the bed and the dogs behavior.
The writing is spare and powerful. I'm often recoiling or grimacing as I listen. I am musing on why the author chose to pull the punch on the rape by not making it a conscious choice, and how she might even be offering the reader the option to choose to not believe a rape happened, even as a physical assault is made clear. But I'm just past this episode, so don't have further context yet.
Edited to add: I read Haunting of Hill House with Ruth and A Public Space earlier this year, and am reading and writing from Minneapolis.
waiting for my copy on hold at LAPL. look forward to the discussion. So important to read Palestinian writers now and I so appreciate your starting this discussion!
I just finished the book. Wow.
I was surprised at how detached I felt from all the characters in Part One. The violent rape and water hose scenes were difficult for me to read, but I felt like it was happening very far away (maybe because of the lack of dialogue or the way it was described). I was not emotionally invested.
I thought it was interesting that in Part One the author put more emphasis on the dog — the dog’s dialogue (the howling, barking, panting, etc.) and the dog’s emotional state.
And I thought there was a parallel between the rape scene where the girl bites the officer and the last scene in Part One where the officer grips the dog’s muzzle. I thought the description of the girl’s saliva was meant to dehumanize. Whereas, I don’t think the dog is ever described as having any saliva, drool, or smell in Part One.
I thought this was a good lesson on perspective. And maybe a way to make the reader think about humanizing/dehumanizing narratives. (I was so relieved that the dog was spared. And then I felt guilty that I cared so much about the dog.)
Part Two was the opposite for me. I was completely invested in the girl, her road trip, and search for answers. And though there was little description of violence, I very much felt that I was there for the shooting. And that scene stayed with me.
The dogs that kept popping up in Part Two seemed more secondary to me and far off in the distance.
I found it very interesting that in Part One the girl is introduced to us as a “black mass” and in Part Two it is the dog who is introduced as a “black mass.”
The other thing that is striking to me is how many of the characters seem (as someone already said) to be acting on instinct. In Part Two, I felt that the girl is possessed by something, maybe the spirit of the girl in Part One. In any event, it feels as if the girl in Part Two lacks free will (for example, eating the chewing gum). Maybe this feeling of possession is a sort of a physical representation of being occupied.
Thank you for starting this group, Ruth. I've read very little by Palestinian writers, mainly Mahmoud Darwish.
This book has been haunting me since I finished it a week ago. For me, the marked exteriority of the first section elevated it to the level of allegory. Shibli both effectively addresses acts of violence perpetrated against women in all wars and the impossibility of those on either side of intractable conflicts to know and recognize each other as fully human. The extreme interiority of the second section nicely contrasts with the flatness of the characters in the first, and emphasizes the journalist-narrator's inability to understand her own motivations and responses. She is driven to uncover the "truth" of the Bedouin girl's experience because of the minor detail of the coincidence of the murder of the girl occurring twenty-five years to the day before she was born. And no matter how many other "minor details" she focusses on--the smell of gasoline, the barking dog, the dust from the explosion, the shell casing found on the sand--she gets no closer to understanding the truth of the girl's experience or her own. (Calling the narrator autistic is completely off, she has been living with the direct and indirect stresses of occupation for years. It's not surprising she has developed coping mechanisms.)
At first, I thought the parallel Shibli draws between the officer eradicating the insects in his tent and the soldiers clearing the desert was too obvious, but after the murder of the Bedouins and finally the girl and the slaughter of the camels, I found it justified in the context of this novella.
It's a harrowing book, but one that I think does deepen our understanding of the current conflict, its history and its repercussions.
I finished the book in one reading today, finally after too many obligations kept me from it. This reads to me more like a fable than a novella. The characters aren’t rounded, or knowable, and we’re only allowed into the heads of two of them--the officer in the first half and the woman in search of the truth about the rape/murder in the second half. The hallmark of the novel is getting inside a character’s head utterly. Another aspect missing here is any previous history of these two characters. We have no idea about their families, their backgrounds, their personalities even, beyond the most rudimentary depiction. The officer is obsessed with cleanliness. The woman is fearful. Obviously this failure by the author to imagine them more fully is intentional. it mirrors the officer’s inability to imagine the humanity of the Bedouin girl. And it mirrors the woman “investigator’s inability “to uncover the incident as experienced by the girl.” Yet the author could have imagined the incident from the Bedouin’s girl’s inner perspective, that’s what novelists do. Shibli’s refusal reminds me of the sensations I get when I visit Israel and Occupied Palestine, of an intractability, an implacable stoniness governed by a relentless sun.
Thank you for focussing your writing here like this. AND for your bio of Shirley Jackson: magnificent!
Personally, it stopped a bit abruptly for me; I’d liked to have learned how her husband (and kids) handled her unsurprising and way-too early death from bad health in the short run. She had been the linchpin of that family.
Hi Ruth, I do not have this book, but I find your email very interesting. I thought I would shed some light that could contribute to the discussion amongst your readers. I understand and have heard that in the Jewish religion, it is acknowledged that rape can take place, it is after all a common form of conquering others. However, and this is what I have found fascinating, men are told that if they do rape, they must shave the head of their victim and take her as a wife. It would seem that what went on at that time was done haphazardly. Of course we know that none of it is acceptable, but perhaps the offender was misguided.
Please understand that my comment does not reflect my opinions in any way. It is just something I have heard and found interesting.
Litprom, the organization that grants the LiBeraturpreis, has issued a public apology to Adiana Shibli--3 months after their decision to move the ceremony from the Frankfurt Book Fair. Better than nothing, I suppose, but still, too little, too late, especially since they do not offer any concrete suggestions for an award ceremony. https://www.litprom.de/beste-bücher/liberaturpreis/preisträgerin-2023/
I’m sorry! I’m thinking it was presumptuous to reference other literature in my comments that maybe not everyone has read.
I just listened to this marvelous interview with Shibli, and learned a great deal, and came away totally impressed by her: https://tinhouse.com/?s=adania+shibli
Hello everyone. I finished the book last night and have enjoyed reading your comments. I have fairly little to add. Just a few things. One is that I'm mystified by Coetzee's blurb, referring to "two profoundly self-absorbed narrators--an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale." Leaving the latter aside, which "narrator" is he referring to in the first half?
If Coetzee thinks the officer is "a psychopath," why does he call him a narrator? And how is he a psychopath? Calling him that almost seems to let him off the hook. (How carefully did JMC read the book??)
The bite comes from an unknown "creature"; later, the officer goes on a rampage against the innocent arachnids and insects in his hut. This seems allegorical to me: punish the innocents for the wound inflicted by an ill-discerned enemy.
I agree with Ruth that the smell he attributes to the girl is likely the smell of his own wound. And agree with others that it is a moral stench.
But why the whole addition of the bite and the soldier's days of wandering, his stoic determination to stay upright even when something is undermining him from within? I still don't know what all this "means," just know that it has a powerful, even hypnotic effect on the reader.
I'm struck by how little comment there has been on the dog. There is an ur-dog followed by a number of dogs, most of which howl. I found this motif both powerful and elusive.
Also the camels: Shibli makes the animals "mute" (in the sense of lacking human language) but eloquent witnesses as well as victims to the same violence the soldiers inflict on the Bedouins. I have been tracking the depiction of animals in literary texts for some years now; increasingly also writers are paying attention to animals as subjects in the environment, kin to you and me just as alien "others" are actually kin to you and me.
Ultimately, everyone in the story seems to be half-hypnotized. As if war, and before it, the construction of "the enemy," deprived people of mental clarity, even volition.
I am not entirely sure that I "like" the ending. It seems a little . . . cheap?
And yet the novella is a small tour de force, haunting and original.
I wonder if Shibli was at all influenced by Camus' The Stranger. Also--not necessarily an influence on Shibli--but another novel I'm currently reading, History, by Elsa Morante, depicts its main character as a combination of terrorized and canny, a damaged and lonely woman who must contend alone with a hostile world--and the inciting incident in this novel is rape committed by a soldier.
Are there any interviews with Shibli available online?
Ruth, thank you so much for launching this group. I have admired your criticism for years.
I finished listening to Minor Detail today. What a strange, upsetting book.
I found the contrast between the extreme exteriority of the first part and the interiority of the second interesting. The first part w the soldiers is cinematic and reminded me of Claire Denis' film Beau Travail. I agree that the wound is a metaphor, however inexact.
I read the narrator of part 2 as neurodivergent. The way she described her life, her habits, and interactions w others all had hallmarks of neurodivergence (autism and OCD specifically) to me. I didn't find this an impediment to me experiencing her as a complex character.
I wrote a longish comment earlier and was unable to post it, so this is a brief test. I'm enjoying this conversation enormously and am grateful to Professor Franklin for initiating this marvelous reading project. This is the first novel I've read by a Palestinian novelist. I'm an English professor and am considering writing on this novel. I'll say more if I'm able to post this. best, Sheila Teahan
Hi everyone
I hope I will have time to take part in this group. I need to get the book. How do I do this.
Hi from New Mexico. Apologies for these disconnected comments. First-the washing. I don’t recall how many times Moshe fills his cup with water, washes his body and then dumps the water (and rinses and hangs towel to dry)-but as it is one of the first things he does, it suggests to me the connection between cleanliness and order and the idea of the officer, and by extension, his platoon, and their primitive camp as not belonging there, claiming ownership of a place that is not his or theirs.
And then a couple of Heart of Darkness moments: descriptions of the girl as a curled up ‘black mass,’ her black hair and her ‘right breast’ and her screaming, not so dissimilar from Marlow’s/Conrad’s references to African black bodies and limbs, and to the howling of Kurtz’s mistress. The identity of the native as a sum of physical body parts and a voice without comprehensible words. Also the absurdity of daily patrols through an illusive landscape of endless dunes and the forbidding sun always forcing the soldiers under too little shade. That the Negev (where I lived for a year) is a deceptive mirage as is Conrad’s jungle wrapped in fog - both perhaps conveying a place that the foreigner should not penetrate, though he does anyway and in brutal ways. And of course the only direct words we hear is Moshe’s clipped lecture on claiming and civilizing the desert; he’s like a parody of himself—the narrator’s(and Shibli’s?) narrative of Zionist aspirations. Still thinking about the novel’s end but that’s enough scattered thoughts for now.
Thank you Ruth. I have read Susan Abulhawa, Ghassan Kanafani, and Sayed Kashua. I love the opportunity to listen to and learn from both Palestinian and Israeli literary voices, even when, as in this case, they leave me upset and with little hope.
I'm waiting to reread the novel until I receive my hard copy, so just a few brief comments. The novel is fascinating for its use of what has traditionally been called point of view--or in narratology, focalization. The limited third person narration of the first section is brilliant and harrowing, as others have commented. That section proceeds through a relentless and terrifying accretion of "minor detail" (the novel's title is clearly ironic) culminating in the assault on the girl. I, too, have been puzzling over the implications of the bite. As others have commented, the officer's hallucinatory state helps explain his attack, and the bite is also clearly tropological. It seems to important a psychic wound of a kind that renders his rape and murder of the girl a species of compensation for an emasculating trauma. The psychic dimension of the wound helps account for his secrecy about it, and for the sense in which he is actively cultivating the infection effected by the bite. It becomes a cause in its own right.
Thank you so much, Ruth, for bringing this book to our attention. It was a very hard read but I'm so glad to have done so. And Dan, if you're here on this Substack, thank you for writing about your amazing class. I wish all my students could take a class like that. That is the epitome of what liberal education should be.
I have to say I stumbled on the word "cleanse" in the opening scene, where the Israeli platoon is said to be "cleansing the Negev of enemies." I'd love to know if that's the word Israelis used in those days (since the phrase "ethnic cleansing" was only coined in the 1990s). The pattern of images of clean/dirty are very resonant. There is also the religious connotation of ritual cleansing which has clear moral and physical implications.
I also wrestled with your question about whether the novelist has a responsibility to offer context. It would be quite easy to read this novel as confirming a view that all Israeli soldiers/all Israelis are monsters (the impassive third person point of view notwithstanding). I guess I would say that responsibility must be the reader's, not the writer's. Or not only the writer's. Here you could say the second half of the novel is also "context."
I think the most powerful aspect of the novel is the way it shows how random and meaningless are the arbitrary "borders" men impose upon the landscape, which is nothing more than sand and dirt. The distinction between cleanliness and filth being another kind of border.