Minor Detail

I read/listened to this a couple weeks ago. It devastated me at the time. It devastates me now. 

The story is in 2 parts. The first part is from the POV of an Israeli soldier, I don't remember his exact rank, except that he had authority, as he discovers a Bedouin girl. It's based on a real case, and we see the tragic end of this child. I say child because the actual girl seems to have been under 15.  

The tone of this first part is very matter of fact. This man is cold, emotionless, fastidious, and regimented, and so this is the way the story is expressed even as atrocities happen. As he allows and participates in atrocities. 

The second portion is the story of a Palestinian woman who reads an account of the first part of the story, and realizes this happened on her birthday, albeit a different year. She feels compelled to find out more, even though this involves her going to places forbidden to her by the occupation. 

She is not as detached as the man in the first portion, and yet her perspective is not overwrought either. I say this because there's something compelling about the matter-of-fact sharing of all the Palestinian villages that simple have disappeared from the map. That Israeli maps and old maps of the area tell conflicting narratives. 

I don't think you can read this erasure of lives, or villages, alongside the almost forgotten incident with the girl, without hearing the voices of so many Palestinians saying this – that the goal now is to literally and metaphorically erase a people from not just maps but from history. 

As she explores where the girl was assaulted and murdered, the past echoes in ways she can't know, but the reader does, as as the divide between then and now is thin. A dog shows up in both timeline, and it's left to the reader's imagination if it's somehow, mystically, the same dog connecting the two girls/women. If that dog is somehow a ghost demanding justice, or acknowledgement, for the thing he witnessed. 

The ending feels inevitable and packs a punch. 

Terrifyingly brutal – I'm just horribly saddened that this is still happening.

Ending prediction: I wonder if the young woman in the second story is a reincarnation of the girl -- the image of the girl/old lady guiding her where she may have possibly died, and continuing this cycle. The continuing appearance of the dog in addition to the lingering scent of gasoline throughout this book would make sense

This is a two-part short novel. The first part is an account of a true story that happened in Al-Naqab desert in southern occupied Palestine in 1949, where a young Bedouin girl was gang-raped and killed by Israeli soldiers. The second part is fictional based in modern-day Palestine, when the 1949 story was revealed, and a Palestinian woman feels compelled to investigate it further.

This book is not a light read by any means.  I was fascinated by the narration style in the first half of the story, being told from the perspective of the head of an Israeli army unit stationed in Al-Naqab in 1949.  Following that, the shift to the perspective of a young Palestinian woman living in Ramallah, who seems to have some kind of obsessive tendencies, was unexpected, but not jarring. The description of the road she was traveling to get from Ramallah to Yafa was so well done that, as someone who has traveled that road tens or maybe even hundreds of times, I could visualize it as I was listening to the book.

I started reading the book without reading the synopsis, so I didn't know what the story was about. During the first half, for a split second, I was wondering if I had misinterpreted the intentions of the soldier, and whether he actually wanted to keep the Bedouin girl safe from his unit. The pain and horror I felt when the rape started happening was overwhelming.I loved the parallels drawn between the two timelines, particularly with the appearance of the dog, and the smell of kerosene. The ending was as perfect as it was heartbreaking. There are few things that can be conveyed with minimal words, and this was one of them.

It's such a “minor detail” in a well-narrated book, but I wished the narrator was better instructed on how to pronounce Arabic names.