Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Tiny book review

I first met Adania Shibli in Berlin, a few years ago, through some mutual friends from Egypt. I would like to think we are now friends, though she might consider me just an acquaintance. I only say this to explain that I was especially surprised when her award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair was cancelled in October, essentially because her very nationality was deemed offensive. I only say this to explain that I am not exactly unbiased when I heartily recommend her novel, “Minor Detail,” that I and many people picked up to read afterwards.

Minor Detail (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette) offers a deeply human meditation on the reality of Palestine and Israel that I found much more enlightening than the daily feast of horrors I consume on social media. Think of that classic figure in Western literature, the smart and slightly silly girl, the young woman who reads too much and thinks too much for the men around her. For some reason I am currently thinking of Belle in the first 20 minutes of the Disney film Beauty and the Beast (ignore the rest of the movie). Under what conditions is a girl like that allowed to be fanciful and curious and a little clumsy? I read the book in two days and found it softly and silently touching.

But I am not really good at writing about fiction, so here are some of the words I scribbled in my notes at the end of the slim volume: Heat — Water — Sand — Delirium — Air — Sun — Stench — Numbness // Wind — Leaves — Trees — Grass — Cold — Numbness — Stench.