JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The renewal of hostilities in Gaza prompted me to pick up Apeirogon, which has been in the tsundoku for months. In this protracted pandemic year I have been partial to fiction that gives me comfort, and the little I know of the Palestine issue tells me there is no comfort to be found there. As I was finishing Apeirogon, with its beautiful passages reminiscent of McCann’s wondrous Let The Great World Spin, a package of books arrived from my friend in Copenhagen whom I’ve never met in person. One of them was Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. It is brief and impassive, its matter-of-fact tone and aspergetic detail triggering anxiety.

An apeirogon is a shape with countably infinite sides—if you spend your life counting them you might get an answer. That is the approach taken by McCann’s book, an epic nonfiction compendium of stories and information centered on two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli who have both lost young children in the conflict and become friends. It is the feelgood version, if you will, in which one side grasps how the other has been humiliated, and the other grasps how the legacy of trauma up to the Holocaust has shaped their antagonist. The subject is complicated, but empathy might yet save the world.

Minor Detail is pitiless and unsentimental. It opens with an atrocity committed by Israeli soldiers after the triumphant Israeli War of Independence/catastrophic displacement of 700,000 Palestinians who have lived there for many generations. A Palestinian woman becomes obsessed with this event, which is deemed so insignificant that the victim’s name is not even known. She sets out to do research, a fairly simple task that entails painstaking planning, permissions, subterfuges and humiliations, because she is living in the occupation. How can you reconstruct memory while you yourself are being erased?