When the nameless officer in charge of the patrol is bitten by an unknown insect, he sets about obsessively cleansing his quarters, crushing every bug in sight. Told in a procedural style redolent of the clinical detachment that typifies Coetzee’s own prose-an almost preternatural smoothness that seems to evade ideological commitment, as though the author is hiding behind the jointless armature of his prose-the first section of Minor Detail establishes Shibli’s method of resonance. The book opens in the Negev Desert in 1949, as a group of Israeli soldiers patrols the changeful sands for makeshift Arab settlements. Heat and the evanescent shimmer of light-soaked sand rise up like a wall of static separating the book’s sections, while images and motifs flit spectrally through the haze, drawn almost magnetically to their twins on the other side. With its split narrative structure that traces the rape and murder of a young Bedouin girl in 1949 in its first half, and then a young woman’s investigation of this crime in the present day in its second, the novel embodies structurally the mirage-like qualities of the past-its haziness and immateriality, and the way, depending on one’s angle of perception, it seems to assume a form one moment and slough it off the next. Set largely in contemporary Palestine, Adania Shibli’s new novel Minor Detail takes up similar concerns, centering on a quest for confirmation that increasingly comes to resemble the fool’s errand of attempting to pin down a mirage. There’s a “particular symbolic appropriateness” to these laws, under the proscriptions of which, Coetzee explains, it’s “as though the passer-by no means of confirming that what he saw-those buildings rising out of the sands in all their sprawl of gray monotony-was not a mirage or a bad dream.”

Coetzee writes in his essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” a prescient interrogation of the representational voids typically found in novels produced under oppressive governmental regimes, “burgeon all over the face of South Africa.” Despite this ubiquity, he observes, a two-fold blindness reigns-the blindness of ubiquity itself, which buries any too-present phenomenon, and the institutional blindness produced by laws prohibiting the representation of these facilities.

Minor detail adania shibli