World Literature Reading Group

Our World Literature Reading Group aims to showcase literature written outside of the anglophone world. On our journey we will make a variety of stops in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America, tracking down the masterpieces that might have otherwise been overlooked. In this second group, we will discuss the Palestinian writer and essayist Adania Shibli’s 2017 novel Minor Detail.

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, ​Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

“All novels are political and Minor Detail, like the best of them, transcends the author’s own identity and geography. Shibli’s writing is subtle and sharply observed.” Guardian

“Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory of whodunit - a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers - it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma [...] For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis.” New York Review of Books