Minor Detail

Abstract

In his essay on Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin notes the double meaning of the word “unfolding”: “A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper.”1 Ordinary parables unfold in the second sense, where “it is the reader’s pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand,” but Kafka’s parables unfold like buds into blossoms: multiplying in complications, more like poetry than allegory.2 Adania Shibli’s recent novel Minor Detail shares something of Kafka’s parabolic strangeness—the brevity, the nameless characters, the initial suggestion of allegory, and the subsequent refusal to behave like one; the air of nihilism. While the novel’s two brief parts, set fifty-five years apart, seem as though they will speak to each other across the gulf of time in a way that provides resolution, by the final page the reader has in their hands only a repetition of violence for which it is clear no narrative will provide consolation. Minor Detail opens with the bleak account of an Israeli military outpost in the Negev in 1949 as the nascent Israeli state annexes more territory in the south. An unnamed lieutenant is our protagonist, responsible for killing two Bedouins and capturing a third, a girl of ambiguous age, whom he and his subordinates rape and subsequently kill. The entire passage is rendered in meticulous, traumatic detail. Shibli pays as much attention to the light illuminating indentations in the sand and the rotation of the sun and stars as to the movement of the soldiers around the camp, as to the soap suds falling from the girl’s body or the lieutenant’s face as he shaves. Darkness has a solid presence, moving in and out of spaces. Smells and sounds penetrate or invade ears and noses. Perception is at once intensely localized and depersonalized, giving us the sense that we are observing the action askance. Sensory detail endows the passage with intense reality, and, although very short, this section has the feeling of an unbearable, interminable chronicle, paratactic, stripped of emotional content. The closest we come to psychology is the commander’s reaction to an infected insect bite on his leg that produces a revolting smell, for which he blames the girl. The narrator in the second half of the novel is a woman living in the West Bank in 2004. While she is as meticulous as the previous, third-person narrator in recording sensory detail, this speaker additionally gives us a clear view of her internal life. She registers the changes in her emotional state, from fear to anxiety to agitation, to loneliness, to horror. She has read a newspaper article about the 1949 gang rape and murder at the Nirim outpost, and is struck by the event’s date, which is the same as her own birthday, twenty-five years later. Provoked more by this minor coincidence than by the crime itself, which, she states, is not particularly unusual when compared with what happens daily in “a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing” (60), she sets out in