![]() ![]() Shibli presents us with these incidents in fragments of clinical prose, dealing with the most violent episodes in brief, brisk sentences that concentrate on small details – smells, for instance – and leave almost everything else to the reader’s imagination. Fixated on personal hygiene and his task of clearing their newly captured territory of Arabs – it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how the two are linked – we see the soldier often in the airless confines of his hut, but also out in the desert as he imprisons, rapes and eventually kills a Bedouin girl captured on a desert patrol. In the midst of the heat and dust we encounter a nameless soldier, whose actions over the next four days are related to us in a third person narrative that is at once reserved and excruciatingly intimate. Based on a true story, the novel opens in 1949 in the Negev – or Naqab – desert, an arid region of southern Israel that runs along the border with Egypt down to the Gulf of Aqaba. ![]()
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