The action is set following the creation of the state of Israel a year earlier, its further conquest of Arab lands and the flight or expulsion of 726,000 Palestinians from its territory. Split into two parts, Minor Detail begins with an account of the events leading up to the rape and murder of a young Arab woman by a platoon of Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert in 1949. Whether that is in any way redemptive or only something that serves to heighten a sense of loss is for readers to decide. And it’s a journey rendered all the more moving by the subtlety of the story’s form and the elegance of its craft. Here however is a calculated description of helplessness in the extreme, in which all roads towards agency and action, change or transformation, are revealed to be dead ends. This is a novel, translated from the original Arabic, about helplessness, a sensation that, for a variety of reasons, many of us may feel we have had to get used to over the past several months.
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