Good evening!
I hope everyone is well and surviving the extreme cold! Sorry to be annoying but this is actually my personal heaven, I love the winter. Understandable if you don’t, but let me have this.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
This week I read Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (2020). This is an astonishingly impactful novel for such a slim text, set in Palestine just after the Nakba and then some years later. This is truly a book of two halves, connected together by place. The first half is told in stark, simplistic prose, and tells the story of an Israeli officer leading a campaign in the Palestinian desert in order to ‘capture Arabs.’ It is set over a few days, beginning with an insect bite and ending with the murder of a young woman after being imprisoned in their camp.The second half follows a woman living in Ramallah who reads about the death of the woman years prior and becomes fixated on it, determined to go to the site of the capture and murder and learn about it and its context from archives and museums, despite the (literal) obstacles in her way. These are two very different stories, told in completely opposing ways and yet it works harmoniously -- perfectly, even.
The first thing I would say that struck me was how the woman we meet in the second half of the book is a pretty unusual person. When we come across narratives that have some element of history and/or politics in them, there is always the risk that the protagonist becomes a bit soulless, just a mouthpiece for the author to move across landscapes and to do things that touch on the moments of history that they want to present. Shibli’s protagonist, however, is an oddball; a woman who becomes fixated on things, who overthinks things, who wants to be liked but also wants to remain distant from her colleagues and neighbours -- in short, a real person with a fully fleshed out interiority. I really appreciated this about the text and was fully invested in how she went about things, which was often surprising.
That is not to say that Shibli created a character who just happens to live in a place and time that she wants to write about; her protagonist is also shaped by her surroundings. She is afraid because she has a lot to be afraid of-- she is jumpy because of the frequent bombings she endures and she is easily intimidated because of the checkpoints she has to go through to leave Ramallah. She finds comfort in her work, until she arrives there one day and the street that she works on has been besieged and she has to find a different way in, and then has to prepare herself for a nearby bombing. She talks about borders, and how her sense of borders is different to other people’s because she sees them everywhere. These kinds of realities about being a Palestinian just trying to live their life are woven into a much larger character study that feels original and is really well-constructed.
Across the entire novel, probably my main takeaway would be how huge historical events are, indeed, made up of things that are spoken of as if they are minor details. Reading about one woman’s murder is horrific and brutal, and yet in its broader context it becomes something that could (and is) very easily forgotten, unless one or two people -- usually years after the fact -- take notice. There is a focus on women in this particular novel, and how they come against frightening and overpowering senses of masculinity, but there is also a broader look at how everyone suffers for this.
I’m now reading Gavin Lambert’s Running Time (1982), which I’m already obsessed with. To return to a running theme in this newsletter, Lambert is the opposite of what Julia once described as a ‘sentence criminal’ and uses the opposite of what Rachel calls a ‘robot voice’. His prose is rich but doesn’t run away from itself. As an example:
Most important of all the changes, although Mother found her heart’s desire when Baby Jewel began to shine, she lost something, and so did I. She found it increasingly hard to understand my life except on a mundane level, to use one of her favourite expressions, and I found it a growing problem to understand hers on any level at all.
Perfect in conveying sentiment, in punctuation use, in drama, in narrative, in intent…in everything.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I’ve had a few sales on Etsy recently so decided to treat myself to a new book.I went for Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (2017) after reading, and deeply loving, an ARC of her newest novel Memory Piece (2024).