In the second part, an unnamed Palestinian woman in Ramallah – who is also haunted by spiders and howling dogs – reads about the crime in the paper, and becomes obsessed with it, mainly due to the fact that the murder took place exactly 25 years before she was born. While on patrol, they find a Bedouin girl, and capture her, taking her back to their camp, where they rape and murder her. They are led by an unnamed soldier, who is haunted by the spiders that crawl around the corners of his hut (one of which bites him, leaving him terribly ill) and howling dogs in the desert. A troop of Israeli soldiers have been sent to the Negev desert to watch over the border with Egypt, and “cleanse it of any remaining Arabs”. Divided neatly into two halves that mirror each other, but not too perfectly, it starts in the 1949 war in which Israel declared independence and grabbed parts of Palestine, the origins of the contemporary liberation movement.

This sense of confusion ultimately works in favour of the occupying Israeli government, which is able to spin a tale of conflict between equals, rather than a process of colonisation.Ĭutting through this haziness comes Adania Shibli’s short, seething and immaculate novel Minor Detail, in part about the nature of truth and how our conceptions of it impede our ability to see it clearly. There’s another arcane detail – some agreement, usually made by foreign powers – that turns out to be somehow fundamental. Every time you think you have a grasp of what’s going on and why, the picture warps. Reading media about the latest expression of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a bit like going through the looking glass and down a rabbit hole.

Minor detail adania