He went on spraying her, arching his body to avoid the water flying in every direction, and circled around her, aiming the water first at her stomach, then her head, her back, her legs, and her feet, where grains of sand stuck to her skin, then at her torso again. She is instead interested in amplifying the ease and silence surrounding the crime by playing on the distant voice, unnamed characters, and an hour-by-hour account.

Shibli makes no attempt to turn the victim into a hero, to suspiciously grant her a generous space. Fiction writers tend to get lost in this pursuit to “speak for” the victim, to resurrect her, to narrate from the point of view of the marginalized. The power of Shibli’s craft lies in the way she replaces voice with language, bypassing the search for the subaltern’s voice. Although her destiny might be predictable in context, the unfolding of her tragic story is where Shibli throws in all her weight, producing a piece of political fiction that stands out in contemporary Arabic literature. In one attack, they murder dozens of Bedouins and their animals, and capture a teenage girl, who then becomes the center of the story. Narrated in a distant third person, the first part of the novel follows Israeli soldiers as they set out on a mission to clear the area of roaming Arabs to make room for a new settlement. The novel begins in the summer of 1949 in the Negev desert. If anything, Shibli makes it clear, with every line of her laborious novel, how war and conflict occur on the level of narrative, history, and the individual psyche. Minor Detail has been tagged, by reviewers and her publisher, as a “war novel” or classified under “Israeli-Arab conflict,” yet it takes only a few pages for the reader to realize how stereotypically lazy such labels are. During her absence, Shibli was working on growing her theoretical and research approaches to support her grand quest for a language of life under occupation. That’s how long it has taken to complete this short novel, her third work of fiction.

When discussing her latest novel, Minor Detail, Palestinian author Adania Shibli can’t hide her excitement at the mention of language-her eyes widen and lighten up, as does her smile-a language in pursuit of which she spent at least a decade of her life. Read more about the series in this interview with Meyer and Kareem, or have a look at the first installment in the series, Meyer's review of Cockfight by María Fernanda Ampuero. This is the second installment in WWB's new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, in which Lily Meyer and Mona Kareem review translated books with a focus on the translation itself.

Adania shibli minor detail