Apeirogon
Colum McCann, 2020
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400069606
Summary
An epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers.
Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on to the schools their children attend to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.
But their lives, however circumscribed, are upended one after the other: first, Rami’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, becomes the victim of suicide bombers; a decade later, Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by a rubber bullet.
Rami and Bassam had been raised to hate one another. And yet, when they learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them. Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace—and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict.
This extraordinary novel is the fruit of a seed planted when the novelist Colum McCann met the real Bassam and Rami on a trip with the non-profit organization Narrative 4. McCann was moved by their willingness to share their stories with the world, by their hope that if they could see themselves in one another, perhaps others could too.
With their blessing, and unprecedented access to their families, lives, and personal recollections, McCann began to craft Apeirogon, which uses their real-life stories to begin another—one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful.
The result is an ambitious novel, crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers’ moving story at its heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—Dublin Institute of Technology
• Awards—U.S. National Book Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in New York City
Colum McCann is an Irish author of several novels including, Let the Great World Spin (2009), which was the winner of the U.S.'s National Book Award, as well as the International Dublin Literary Prize. For his body of work—novels and short stories over some two dozen years—he has been the recipient of numerous awards.
McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and studied journalism in the former College of Commerce in Rathmines, now the Dublin Institute of Technology. He became a reporter for The Irish Press Group, and by the age of 21 had his own column in the Evening Press. McCann says that his work as a journalist gave him an excellent platform for launching a career in fiction.
In 1986 McCann moved to the U.S., working for a short period in Hyannis, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Between 1986 and 1988 he took a cross-country bike trip, traveling nearly 7,500 miles (12,000 km) in order to experience "a true democracy of voices." In 1988 he moved to the state of Texas where he became a wilderness educator with juvenile delinquents.
He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he began writing the stories that he later included in his his first collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1993).
For 18 months, between 1993-94, McCann and his wife Allison lived in Japan, teaching English as a foreign language. It was during his time that he finished his work on Sloe Black River. In 1994 he and his wife moved to New York, where they now live with their three children.
Novels and story collections
1993 - Fishing the Sloe Black River (Stories)
1995 - Songdogs
1998 - This Side of Brightness
2000 - Everything in this Country Must (Stories)
2003 - Dancer
2006 - Zoli
2009 - Let the Great World Spin
2013 - TransAtlantic
2015 - Thirteen Ways of Looking (Stories)
2020 - Apeirogon
Awards and Honors
In addition to the U.S.'s National Book Award (2009) and the International Dublin Literary Prize (2011) for Let the Great World Spin, McCann has also received the following recognition over the years:
Pushcart Prize, Rooney Prize, Irish Novel of the Year Award, Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award, Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame, Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, Deauville Festival Literary Prize (the Ambassador Award), Medici Book Club Prize, Grinzane Award in Italy, Guggenheim Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, International Dublin Literary Award finalist.
(Author Bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/28/2002.)
Book Reviews
[McCann's] analysis of the predicaments that face the Middle East is not raw or original or sophisticated. His message is optimistic and banal. Apeirogon is like a political memoir that bangs on about the importance of bipartisanship as if the senator had, just this morning, arrived at the idea.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[A] powerful and prismatic new novel.… This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters…reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows…. [T]hese fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness…. They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and the most difficult to read.… [T]he novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project… [so that] reading Apeirogon we move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; we begin to share it…. Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener…, an exceedingly important [novel]. It does far more than make an argument for peace; it is, itself, an agent of change.
Julie Orringer - New York Times Book Review
[T]he desperation of the [Mideast] situation has brought forth a work of art whose beauty, intelligence and compassion may go some way to changing things. 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.… You don’t read Apeirogon so much as feel it, as the particular tragedies of Bassam and Rami are lived out in an ever-present moment of loss ... For all its grief, Apeirogon is a novel that buoys the heart. The friendship of Bassam and Rami is a thing of great and sustaining beauty ... This, the novel suggests, is the solution to the conflict: something as simple and easy as friendship, as the acknowledgement of a shared experience, as love.
Alex Preston - Guardian (UK)
McCann…examines with skill and empathy the characters’ private agonies as they play out against the backdrop of war; his virtuosic storytelling conjures the confounding realities of the Israeli occupation…. Throughout, there’s a rich tension between the factual and the imagined, and in the way particular tribulations are part of a universal experience…. Apeirogon reminds us that such incandescent art evokes humility and light in the face of oppression and loss.
Oprah Magazine
[A] kaleidoscopic, wildly ambitious hybrid of fact and fiction…. McCann’s storytelling radiates outward to include everything from meditations on Middle Eastern geography and the history of birds to the last meal of a French president and the lost operas of the Holocaust…. [H]e’s also woven something tensile and beautiful out of terrible pain.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) [M]asterful.… [T]wo real men working together toward Middle Eastern peace.… Balancing its dazzling intellectual breadth with moments of searing intimacy, this is a transformative vision of a historic conflict and a triumph of the novelist’s art.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [B]eautifully re-creates Rami and Bassam's real-life relationship while offering a sweeping range of counterbalancing narratives, ultimately conveying the profound essentiality of their friendship. An important book. —John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Library Journal
(Starred review) [T]ragic and transporting…. McCann meshes the actual and the imagined… 1,000 passages… in homage to the Arabian Nights.…[W]riting with stunning lyricism…he traces the ripple effects of violence and grief,… and the miraculous power of friendship and love, valor and truth.
Booklist
(Starred review) [A] soaring, ambitious triumph…. McCann wheels outward in a widening circuit, not unlike the birds that form a central metaphor that recurs throughout the book.… [R]emarkable…. Imperfect but ultimately triumphant, McCann's latest might be his finest yet.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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