Apeirogon (McCann) - Book Reviews

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