I hesitate to recommend Minor Detail, by Palestinian writer ʻAdanīyah Shiblī, but I cannot stop reflecting on its perfect aesthetic approach. The first section of the book is horrifically boring. Narrated by the captain of an occupying army, whose descriptions of the war crimes his unit commits are so dull that they are difficult to read, not because they are graphic, but because they are so mundane. The second section of the book is told from the perspective of a Palestinian woman in occupied Palestine, who is investigating the incident relayed in the first section. The ending is devastatingly brilliant.Publisher's description:
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. ʻAdanīyah Shiblī masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.