Is it absurd to suggest that a novel might succeed where generations of politicians have failed? Perhaps, but then Apeirogon is the kind of book that comes along only once in a generation. But perhaps that’s the point – the desperation of the situation has brought forth a work of art whose beauty, intelligence and compassion may go some way to changing things. Now each side has retreated into belligerent isolation, with Donald Trump gleefully fanning the flames of discord. It feels as if the situation in the Middle East is always a reflection of its age. It’s a strange time for a novel as full-hearted as Apeirogon. It does far more than make an argument for peace it is, itself, an agent of change. But it’s indisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves. Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener. Reading Apeirogon we move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside we begin to share it. the novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project.
McCann’s brilliant act of novel-making builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around Rami’s and Bassam’s first-person accounts, a rich and comprehensive context that allows us into the fathers’ experiences, their histories, their minds. They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and the most difficult to read. these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness. This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters.reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows. Musical, muscular, delicate and soaring, it is a book for our times from a writer at the height of his powers. In this epic novel named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides Colum McCann crosses centuries and continents, stitching time, art, history, nature and politics into a tapestry of friendship, love, loss and belonging. There was a candy bracelet in her pocket she hadn't had time to eat yet. Bassam's ten-year-old daughter Abir was shot and killed by a member ofthe border police outside her school.
Rami's thirteen-year-old girl Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber while out shopping with her friends. The same journey for Bassam takes an hour and a half.īoth men have lost their daughters. It takes Rami fifteen minutes to drive to the West Bank. Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin live near one another yet they exist worlds apart.
Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart' KAMILA SHAMSIE
'Nothing like any book you've ever read' MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
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