![]() ![]() ![]() Mireille JuchauYou worked on Minor Detail for twelve years. Our interview, in English, spans three countries-Greece, Germany, and Australia, where I live. It was summer in Berlin and they were planning to travel to Palestine until the virus numbers soared. We began emailing shortly after Adania and her son emerged from pandemic lockdown. Yet by channeling its preoccupations with disturbed land, persecution, and injustice through two distinctive sensibilities, in showing the absurdity of life under occupation, the novel is transcendent. Minor Detail is grounded in the shifting borders of past and present-day Palestine/Israel. A year later, as I read the stammering amateur detective in her third novel, I was transfixed. Shibli’s precise language and formal innovation create a palimpsest-the real hovers (almost imperceptibly) above the imagined, just as the past shadows and irradiates the present.Īdania lives in Palestine, where she was born, and in Germany where I met her briefly at the Berlin Literaturhaus. Halfway through, the novel shifts into the present, to the restless mind of the Palestinian woman who investigates the crime. With a cool omniscience and forensic detail, Shibli shows us a methodical perpetrator oblivious to suffering, even to his own. ![]() In the opening half of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail(New Directions) an Israeli Defense Force commander and his platoon capture and brutalize a young Bedouin woman in the Negev desert. ![]()
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