![]() Yet what is one to do when the details constitute the predicament itself? When a few unbearable fragments are all that we cannot unknow and when they point to all that we never will know? Adania Shibli’s third novel, Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, attends to these questions with imagination and searing irony. ![]() Amichai reimagines this perhaps undue need for the recollection of details-committing to memory the kinds of clothing our loved ones last wore, for example-as an existential imperative, or that which leaves room for human individuation in the face of death’s leveling processes. In translation, it’s impossible to tell that the original Hebrew recalls the Passover Haggadah’s Rabbi Yehuda (naturally), who proffered a mnemonic for the ten plagues, brutal punishments that God memorably rained down on the Egyptians. ![]() ![]() ![]() “Try to remember some details,” implores the speaker of one of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai’s well-known poems (Amichai, 318). ![]()
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