They take a Palestinian teenager and her dog hostage, gang-rape her over the course of several days, kill the girl, and then bury her in the desert.

On one of their patrols, the Israeli soldiers murder a camp of Arab Bedouin. The Israelis celebrate the war as their War of Independence, while the Palestinians mourn the same war as the Nakba, literally “cataclysm” or “catastrophe,” in which 700,000 of their people were forced into exile. The first narrative centers on an unstable unnamed Israeli officer who leads a group of soldiers on a mission to demarcate the southern border with Egypt, comb through the Negev desert, and cleanse it of any remaining Arabs during the summer of 1949, a year following the 1948 Palestine War between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Unlike the first-person narrative that follows, the first is told through a distant third-person perspective, in which we cannot access the mental spaces of any of the characters except for expressions of feeling and physical discomfort. Shibli tells both narratives through an absorbing style of methodical, dispassionate reportage with an obsessive attention to mundane detail, as if she were narrating a series of incidents documented on a video camera. And through this daring and ingenious architecture, Shibli creates a text of resistance in which the second narrative seeks to recover the past events of the first from erasure. The novel is halved into two narratives of equal length, one after the other, and the first recounts an atrocity occurring precisely twenty-five years prior to the second. Adania Shibli, a Palestinian professor and author of three novels in Arabic, adopts a variation of this parallel narrative structure in her novel, Minor Detail, elegantly translated by Elisabeth Jaquette and published by New Directions. What is typical among these twinned and tripled narratives is the sense that each arc is a palimpsest, that its impressions are like watery memories rather than solid facts, that they are recorded in the mind but subject to modification, revision, and clarification. Wallace superimposes stories of multiple characters to show how they are common in their loneliness, their ennui, and their psychic paralysis due to cultural forces of television and other forms of mass media. In Faulkner, concurrent narratives of members of the same community or family comment on how they are differently burdened by a shared past. In James, multiple narrative threads offer shifts in perspective that both illuminate and complicate his multifaceted characters. Simultaneous, parallel narratives that are overlaid upon each other have been employed by writers from Henry James to William Faulkner to David Foster Wallace.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli