He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace. Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.
Writing at the top of his game, Colum McCann brings us a book that we sorely need.”-Elizabeth StroutĬolum McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon-named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides-is a tour de force concerning friendship, love, loss, and belonging.īassam Aramin is Palestinian. The meaning that emerges out of the fragments of the novel, then, is greater than the sum of its parts.From the National Book Award–winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss. One seldom notices when one is caught in the lyrical web of stories and is taken on a circular trip - for instance, reading about rings around birds’ feet to tiny bird-feeders made of hollowed-out bullets to the rubber bullet that killed Bassam’s daughter, one is led back to rings, drawn around the photographs of dead soldiers. Yet, McCann knows exactly when to pull the thread to give the story the right twist and tug at the heartstrings of the reader. The individual vignettes talk of disparate things, connected by a loose thread of associations - of words, memories, history and, at times, trivia. The number of sections tellingly refers to the One Thousand and One Nights - tales “gathered at different times in myriad places”. As such, Apeirogon makes an impressive attempt to push the boundaries of established structures of the postmodern novel. Some of these consist of a single line, some just an image. The novel is woven around this concept: it comprises 1,001 vignettes - after reaching the 500th piece, the segments count backwards to 1, with a single story in between. An apeirogon, McCann explains, is a figure with infinite sides that “approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line”.
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