Minor Detail; or Resistant Reading

On Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

I’ve been writing lately about the pleasures of weirdly structured, strange, and imperfect books, but Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (New Directions, 2020), feels like perfection. To be clear, I mean perfection of an exciting, surprising kind, not the boring perfection of a well-crafted but lifeless novel. Minor Detail makes you admire its beauty and form even as it shocks you and breaks your heart.

It’s told in two parts of precisely equal length — from what I understand equal to the point of having the same number of words, even in the translation. The first half is set in 1949 and tells the story of an Israeli officer who leads a group of soldiers on a mission to find and capture Palestinians in the Negev Desert. They find and murder of group of Bedouin, and then capture a Palestinian girl and rape and murder her. The second half is set near the present day when a woman in Ramallah reads about this atrocity and feels drawn to the murdered girl’s story because it happened exactly 25 years before she was born. She goes on a mission to try to discover more details about the girl and what happened to her.

The novel’s title unlocks so much of its meaning: it’s about what counts as major or minor, who renders that judgment, and what power comes with being the one to render that judgment. Is there such a thing as a major detail? Everything is a detail, I guess, and the question is whether anyone cares.

The first half is in third person and follows the officer as he goes about his day. The narration stays on the outside, reporting what the officer does but never what he thinks. The writing in this part is hypnotic: it’s full of repetition as the officer goes in and out of his hut, interacts with soldiers, goes on excursions out into the desert, sweats, cleans himself, goes to sleep. The sentences are simple and straightforward — there’s no embellishment, just reporting. I imagine this section was a challenge to translate, with its flat tone and the repetition that somehow never becomes boring. But anyone who has read even a little about this book or understands the political context knows that bad things will soon happen, so we read it with suspense, wondering when the violence will kick in.

We — those who know what the book is about — read the story waiting for the girl to be found, but the officer has his own source of suspense: he’s been bitten by a spider, and the bite is bad. He never tells anyone and tries to ignore it and go about his business, but he gets progressively weaker. As I read, I found myself getting worried about that bite and then stopping myself, knowing the officer is a very bad person. Why should I care if that bite ends up killing him? He deserves it!

And yet there’s something about following along as the officer gets weaker and weaker that is hard to resist. It’s a storyline with rising tension that is familiar and we worry about how it will be resolved. The narrative is a trap. Presented with someone’s pain, even the pain of a truly terrible person, it’s very hard not to imagine ourselves in that person’s place and wonder about that person’s future. To the officer, the girl is nothing more than a minor detail, a nuisance, a problem. From the larger perspective of history, she is a minor detail as well. And so is the officer and so is the spider. But the story told about these beings makes them important: the point of view and the details included lead us to pay attention to and care about certain things more than others. We can follow the path it sets out for us, or seems to set out for us, or we can read with resistance, remembering that it’s not the officer’s point of view and not the spider bite that matters.

The novel’s second half is an embodiment of that resistant kind of reading. The unnamed woman from Ramallah comes across a newspaper article about the multiple murders and the girl’s rape and murder and becomes obsessed with it. But it’s not the atrocities that stand out to her; as she says, those atrocities are common “in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing.” What stands out is the “minor detail” of the coincidence with dates, that it all happened exactly 25 years before she was born. That’s what makes her unable to forget the article and move on. Yes, this probably seems like narcissism, she admits, although this is also totally natural. People have an innate tendency “toward a belief in the uniqueness of the self, toward regarding the life one leads so highly that one cannot but love life and everything about it.” That officer probably had a belief in his own uniqueness and loved his own life.

But, she says, she does not love her life and does not love life in general. Instead, she is merely trying to survive. She doesn’t think she’s narcissistic; instead, she thinks she has a problem with borders:

I doubt that a diagnosis of narcissism would fully apply to me here. It’s something else, something related more to that inability of mine to identify borders between things, and evaluate situations rationally and logically, which in many cases leads me to see the fly shit on a painting and not the painting itself, as the saying goes.

She doesn’t know how to “read” the article “properly,” to see that it’s a terrible story but one that is not unusual or even particularly noteworthy. Because she’s a “bad” reader who pays attention to the “wrong” things, who doesn’t see the borders between her life and the murdered girl’s life, she sets out on a journey to learn about her, a journey that takes her across political boundaries that she, as a Palestinian woman, is foolhardy to cross. She’s a “bad” reader but also one of the few who tries to illuminate the lost girl’s life. And this “bad” way of reading might be the very thing that leads to truth:

There are some who consider this way of seeing, which is to say, focusing intently on the most minor details, like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.

The second half is messier than the first; instead of the coolly distant third person of the first half, we get a first person voice that is chatty, rambling, and full of emotion. The sentences are longer and more digressive. We feel the narrator’s terror as she crosses boundary after boundary. We come to care for her, and this time it feels like the right thing to do. Her quest is so ill-advised, but we admire her rebelliousness. Her boundary-crossing feels heroic, although it comes with a very high price.

There’s more to say about form: I haven’t even written about the way the two halves parallel each other, which they do in ingenious ways. And I haven’t discussed the novel’s political implications at all. There’s just so much here, in barely over 100 pages. I think it’s a marvel.

Publishing This Week

It’s another big week for new books. These are new small-press books out this week that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:

• Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller (Grove Press): “Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender.”

• No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Busby Lauren Elkin (Semiotext(e)): “A love letter to Paris and a meditation on how it has changed in two decades, evolving from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, from analog to digital.”

  

• Kaya Days by Carl de Souza, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Two Lines Press): “In Kaya Days, the spirit of [Mauritius] and its many people--Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Franco-Mauritian, and Creole--is distilled into a young woman's daylong search through the uproar for her younger brother, who has gone missing.”

• In the Shadow of the Yali by Suat Dervis, translated by Maureen Freely (Other Press): “Set in a changing Istanbul, this rediscovered 1940s classic from a pioneering Turkish author tells the story of a forbidden love and its consequences.”

• Palmares by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press): “The epic rendering of a Black woman's journey through slavery and liberation, set in 17th-century colonial Brazil.”

• Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming by Antonio Michael Downing (Milkweed Editions): “Blending mythology and memory, Saga Boy follows a young Black immigrant's vibrant personal metamorphosis.”

• Inter State: Essays from California by José Vadi (Soft Skull): “A debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life.”

  

New on the TBR

New books acquired:

• In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press, 2017): I’ve heard so much about this book, and Coffee House Press had a sale recently, so… “A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing West.”

• The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong, translated by Kristen Gehrman (Transit Books, 2020, originally published in 1954): Transit Books also had a sale recently, so… “When Bea meets Erica at the home of a mutual friend, this chance encounter sets the stage for the story of two women torn between desire and taboo in the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.”

• Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre, translated by Sophie Lewis (Transit Books, 2021): “In this Oulipian experiment written without gender markers for its narrator, Noémi Lefebvre presents us with a comic and irreverent reckoning with the rise of nationalism and the hegemony capitalism has on our language, actions, and identities.”

  

Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):

• Three Rooms by Jo Hamya (Mariner Books, 2021): A novel in response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she's working as a research assistant; to a stranger's sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she's been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach.”

• Grievers by Adrienne Maree Brown (AK Press, 2021): Twitter chatter about this book caught my eye. “Grievers is the story of a city so plagued by grief that it can no longer function.”

Current/Recent Reading

• My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long (Tin House, 2021): my current poetry book.

  

• If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballantine Books, 2021): I really enjoyed this novel about a group of young women in Seoul trying to navigate work, family, friendships, and expectations of a culture obsessed with female beauty.

• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (Vintage, 1999): I’m finally reading Anne Carson! So far, this book is weird and moving.

The Cormac Report

We had a (virtual) open house with Cormac’s teacher last week, who seems nice and friendly and organized. Cormac likes him so far. The teacher talked about homework expectations, which seem to be relatively minimal, although not minimal enough for my taste. I didn’t always feel this way, but now I’ve become a person who doesn’t believe in homework for kids. From what I can tell, homework seems to be an expectation placed on teachers by administration because administration thinks that’s what looks best for the school. No teacher Cormac has had so far has made a big deal out of homework assignments, many of which Cormac never did.

The teacher told us kids will be expected to read 20 minutes a night and keep a reading journal. I think there may be a notebook or worksheet or something they will be expected to use. I’m not concerned about the 20 minutes; Cormac has been in the habit of reading in bed before he falls asleep, and I’m sure he reads for more than 20 minutes then. This is a perfect situation, actually: Cormac will do his homework without thinking it’s his homework, and we won’t have to say a word.

The reading journal might be another matter. I can see it becoming a chore. Cormac occasionally talks about his nightly reading — enough so we know it’s a habit — but mostly we don’t ask and he doesn’t tell, and it works out great. Getting him to fill out a form might take away the fun.

Fortunately, his teacher told us that if a child is resisting doing homework and it’s becoming a problem, we can let him know and he’ll find a way to work around the problem: have the child do the homework at school or some other creative solution. I liked his attitude, and I’m wondering if the reading journal does become a problem, whether we can opt out or find some alternative. At this point, at least, before any homework assignments have even been issued, I’m feeling hopeful.