![]() ![]() The one hundred five pages of Minor Detail track over half a century of expansion and dispossession wherein Israel’s borders grow via war, illegal settlements, bulldozing of Palestinian villages, and the normalized, quotidian brutal policing of Palestinian lives. Shibli’s sharp prose, however, refuses this static notion of history. In the Anglo-American context, the Nakba (when recognized at all) is presented in mainstream discourse as a singular episode confined to the past. This term means catastrophe in Arabic and describes the Palestinian experience of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which saw over seven hundred thousand people displaced and exiled from their homes. ![]() The event that binds the book’s temporal halves is the Nakba. Adania Shibli’s sparse, unnerving, and haunting novella Minor Detail is a story divided in two seemingly distinct acts, past and present. ![]()
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