A coiled hose, a howling dog, terebinth trees, soap suds, the smell of petrol on human skin. These details are so subtly embedded in part one of Minor Detail (Text) that when they recur in part two they gain a holographic glow. Palestinian Adania Shibli’s cinematic novel stages a return of the repressed on a national scale by reprising an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers in the Negev region in 1949. In 2003, Israeli newspaper Haaretz used newly unclassified army documents to uncover the crime: “In August 1949 an IDF unit caught a Bedouin girl, held her captive in a Negev outpost, gang-raped her, executed her at the order of the platoon commander and buried her in a shallow grave in the desert.” After a secret trial the commander was jailed and 19 soldiers received light sentences. “On the first night the soldiers abused her,” reported the...