Palestine

When I initially decided I would like to embark on this project, over a decade ago, I planned to read a novel from Palestine. The contrast with Israeli literature felt significant, so earlier this month I read Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. A very short novel, it was translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jacquette and published in 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

This story kept popping up, in bookshops, on social media but it was reading the first few paragraphs that really convinced me to include it, so I'll quote the first here:

"Nothing moved except the mirage. Vast stretches of barren hills rose in layers up to the sky, trembling silently under the heft of the mirage, while the harsh afternoon sunlight blurred the outlines of the pale yellow ridges. The only details that could be discerned were a faint winding border which aimlessly meandered across these ridges, and the slender shadows of dry, thorny burnet and stones dotting the ground. Aside from these, nothing at all, just a great expanse of the arid Negev desert, over which crouched the intense August heat."

Despite its length or perhaps because of it, Minor Detail gives a powerful insight into the area both historically and currently, giving me exactly the contrast that I hoped for, a juxtaposition to the Israeli novel I read some time ago. The understanding of the movement of the Palestinian civilian population, the freedom to travel, the wall and the military presence, is expressed so effectively in this book that it was difficult to pick up the next one and move on from it.