![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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