Sibel Oral

In Cumhuriyet Kitap, Sibel Oral reviewed Minor Detail on its publication in Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s Turkish translation (Küçük Bir Ayrıntı) and interviewed the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli.

Oral recalls reading the novel — shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker, and praised by J.M. Coetzee among others — in “Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s translation” in about an hour, and sitting still for a while when she finished. She asks what makes so short a novel so powerful, noting that it took twelve years to write, and outlines its two-part structure: the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by soldiers in the Negev on 13 August 1949, a year after the Nakba, and, years later, a young woman in Ramallah setting out after this “minor detail”.

In the interview Shibli explains that writing the novel meant not only writing but erasing, pausing and rewriting a whole section to shift a character’s perspective by a single centimetre — hence the twelve years. She relates not to her characters but to the words they demand, and describes her starting point as the way language appears in the worlds of the powerful and the powerless, and the “two faces” of the words that recur in both parts. If all we can reach of a crime is what has been written about it, she says, those words begin to lie when approached too closely, and turn into a trap.

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Source: Sibel Oral, interview with Adania Shibli, Cumhuriyet Kitap, 8–14 October 2021 (in Turkish). Summary in English for this site. View the original page ↗