Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

The borders imposed between things here are many. One must pay attention to them, and navigate them, which ultimately protects everyone from perilous consequences. This grants a person a sense of serenity, despite everything else. There are some people who navigate borders masterfully, who never trespass, but those people are few and I'm not one of them. As soon as I see a border, I either race toward it and leap over, or cross it stealthily, with a step. Neither of these two behaviors is conscious, or rooted in a premeditated desire to resist borders; it's more like sheer stupidity. To be quite honest, once I cross a border, I fall into a deep pit of anxiety. It's a matter, simply put, of clumsiness. Once I realized that I inevitably fail whenever I try to navigate borders, I decided to stay within the confines of my house as much as possible.

In the Negev Desert, in 1949, the officer of a platoon is bitten by some kind of animal in the night. The bite festers and becomes infested; he cleans it and keeps it a secret, though his body is racked by fevers and pains. The platoon comes across a group of Bedouins; they shoot them all, except for a girl, whom they take back to their camp. She's raped, first by the soldiers, then the bitten captain, and then she's taken out to the desert, shot, and buried. In the present, a Palestinian journalist becomes obsessed with her story. The journalist makes her way to the remote spot in the Negev where the murder occurred, hoping to find some kind of information that remains there. But to do so, she must travel illegally, go where she isn't supposed to go, with credentials borrowed from those who are allowed to travel freely--and so knowledge comes at the risk of great violence--yet she goes anyway.

Minor Detail is most notorious these days for having a prize retracted by the Frankfurt Book Fair in the wake of the October 7th attacks in Israel. To read it is to become only more indignant at the injustice of the act, because it is, in part, about the dogged lengths to which Palestinians must go for the kind of free expression that is granted to others without question. The journalist, who perhaps is and is not Shibli herself, cannot explain why she is so drawn to the story of the Bedouin girl: why this one story of injustice and not others? The lengths she goes to in order to find the truth--she must borrow an ID and a credit card, meaning that she puts others at risk as well--suggests a principled determination, but that's not quite right. Like the borders she crosses without premeditation, her obsession with the story seems to be below the level of logic; it drives her on past the point of sense.

But I was drawn, too, to the image of the platoon leader, suffering in stoic silence while also perpetrating terrible crimes of passion. He tries to impose order on his men, forbidding their mistreatment at riflepoint, before raping her himself. The festering animal bite is a mark of rottenness, something that eats at him from inside, even as he tries to hide it; his rape of the girl, perhaps, comes from that secret and shameful place, too. When he goes through his tent, hunting down every possible spider, scorpion, and reptile hiding in every corner, the imagery speaks loudly: he is eradicating the vermin, making the space clean. Later, he captures that desire in a speech to his men. There's been a lot of chatter recently about whether Zionism is a form of settler colonialism, but if this speech--and I have no doubt it is accurate to some of the ideas of early settlers--doesn't fit that term, nothing does:

We cannot stand to see vast areas of land, capable of absorbing thousands of our people in exile, remain neglected; we cannot stand to see our people unable to return to our homeland. This place, which now seems barren, with nothing aside from infiltrators, a few Bedouins, and camels, is where our forefathers passed thousands of years ago. And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring that the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long, after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and expel them for good. After all, Bedouins only uproot, they do not plant things, and their livestock devour every bit of vegetation that lies before them, reducing, day by day, the very few green areas that do exist. We, however, will do everything in our power to give these vast stretches the chance to bloom and become habitable, instead of leaving them as they are now, desolate and empty of people.

Strangely, what Minor Detail reminded me of most, at least in an aesthetic sense, is the stories of Gerald Murnane. It's in the plainness of the language, which is rooted in repetition. The scenes of the platoon leader fastidiously unwrapping, cleaning, and re-wrapping his bitten thigh over and over are as engaging and tension-filled as anything I've read recently. The scenes in the Negev of 1949 are so tense that we are not surprised when violence erupts--we have been waiting for it with held breath. In the modern day, we hope that things will be different, that violence is a thing of the past, but we fear--perhaps even know--that we're mistaken. There's little hope in the way the book ends, perhaps only a sense of grim inevitability, of recognition. The two years since its publication have only proved, despite what a bunch of dumb Germans might think, how true it is.

With the addition of Palestine (damn right I'm counting it), my "Countries Read" list is up to 85!