![]() ![]() ![]() With its split narrative structure that traces the rape and murder of a young Bedouin girl in 1949 in its first half, and then a young woman’s investigation of this crime in the present day in its second, the novel embodies structurally the mirage-like qualities of the past-its haziness and immateriality, and the way, depending on one’s angle of perception, it seems to assume a form one moment and slough it off the next. Set largely in contemporary Palestine, Adania Shibli’s new novel Minor Detail takes up similar concerns, centering on a quest for confirmation that increasingly comes to resemble the fool’s errand of attempting to pin down a mirage. There’s a “particular symbolic appropriateness” to these laws, under the proscriptions of which, Coetzee explains, it’s “as though the passer-by no means of confirming that what he saw-those buildings rising out of the sands in all their sprawl of gray monotony-was not a mirage or a bad dream.” Coetzee writes in his essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” a prescient interrogation of the representational voids typically found in novels produced under oppressive governmental regimes, “burgeon all over the face of South Africa.” Despite this ubiquity, he observes, a two-fold blindness reigns-the blindness of ubiquity itself, which buries any too-present phenomenon, and the institutional blindness produced by laws prohibiting the representation of these facilities. ![]()
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