If there ever was a book for these days, Apeirogon is it. it's a beautiful, heartfelt story of a friendship between a Palestinian and an Israeli, both real people, which places this book into the literary non-fiction category for me. The story is tough to take, which may be why Colum McCann allows the narrative to fly into a sort of stream of consciousness--like listing migratory birds--that tossed me off course. I found this book a struggle and as timely, beautiful and heartfelt as it is, just found it was not for me.

I very much enjoyed this story. It was wonderfully written. I look forward to the author’s next book!

It states very far into this novel: "Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides" and that is a good description of this novel as a whole. This novel is multi-layered, has many facets and facts throughout history, migratory bird analogies as well as following two men: Rami and Bassam, one Israeli and one Palestinian, both fathers who lost their daughters senselessly, tragically when they were both quite young due to violence..

I read this story slowly and methodically, taking in every few pages and really thinking about them. This is a very controversial topic and what Bassam and Rami want to happen, which is to end the Occupation, is heavily debated and most often, not wanted to be discussed at all. They spend a good portion of their time traveling around the world telling their stories and their stories need to be heard.

This story simply put is hauntingly beautiful. It captured me from the onset and held my attention until the very end. Everyone interested in the slightest on this topic or a fan of this author in general or anyone looking for a very different type of read should read or listen to this novel. This, in my opinion, is modern classic literature.

Thank you Netgalley/Random House for my advanced copy and honest review.

Colum McCann was already on my short list of favorite authors, and this book only confirmed that. This novel, based on a true story, reveals the very worst and best in humanity. Presenting his story in a unique format, McCann provides an education on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in bits and pieces, so that, while the topic can be overwhelming, the deep-dive into it was not. The idea that these two men—coming from the situation at such odds—can find their way to empathy is truly inspiring.

Dazzling and devastating are the two descriptors that leap into my mind as I reflect on this book. Written in snippets and short paragraphs, McCann takes us through the history of this troubled region of the world, the development of empathy in two fathers who have each suffered a devastating loss and yet are able to see the futility of war and the beauty and sorrows involved in bird migration. Harrowing and heartbreaking this is a book not to be missed.

By all reckonings, this book should not have taken me year to read, but here we are. The second half went remarkably faster and more smoothly (the self-imposed deadline helped).

That I’m not sure what to say is a mark in favor of the book: it left an impression, and I don’t think I’ll soon forget the writing or story. That said, I also found the structure, while understanding (at least to some degree) the point and art of it, a burden. But maybe that is also the point?! Argh. Thus the conflict. Would not recommend as an entry to the Israeli-Palestinian conversation. Would recommend to more literary readers.

The simplified definition of an apeirogon, pulled from mathworld.wolfram.com, is a figure with an infinite number of sides.
Perhaps, author Colum McCann, chose this word as the title for this novel to exemplify just how many hands, some unknowingly, contributed to the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Like post-it-notes on a refrigerator, McCann gives us snippets of information about birds, music, art and weaponry that sometimes builds upon the story and sometimes has you scratching your head. Some might say, Post-it-Note chapters are a lazy way to write a book, yet,they are meaningful to the story and could be difficult to weave into the story otherwise. Yet, too, it seems in a world of twitter posts and Instagram pictures, short bits of information is what's necessary to grab the attention of people who are too busy to learn more about this bitter conflict full of indignities, segregation and oppression, on both sides.

McCann brings much of this to light in the stories of a Palestinian named Bassam and an Israeli named Rami. Both have young daughters who became victims of the ongoing violence in this volatile area. McCann takes these stories and humanizes them beyond the film clip we see on the six o'clock news. The reader feels their grief and loss, although from opposite sides of the boundary line they are the same. They are humans grieving the same way and adapting to loss the same way. It is an intimate view that goes beyond religion and nationality. Through Bassam and Rami's joint endeavor, they find, and speak on the fact, that justice doesn't come from revenge through more violence.
I looked forward to reading this book from one of my favorite authors but I'm not going to lie, it was a challenge. I put it down several times but its worth the time and effort.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this book for my honest review.

What can I possibly say about Apeirogon by Colum McCann other than read it. I was educated. I was heartbroken, and I cried. I was given hope. I was changed. This is a book and a story I will carry with me for a long time to come. Behind every headline I now read about the conflict between Israel and Palestine will be a vision of Abir and Smadar. Their deaths are the stark reality of this conflict.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2020/01/apeirogon.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.

can colum write anything that isn't unique and original? based on a true story of unlikely friendship between two fathers - one israeli and one palestinian. both have lost daughters, one to suicide bombers and one to the police. together they grive and grow and realize, they're not so different after all.
i learnt more about birds and tracking, than i thought i ever could.

The loss of a child can forge bonds when, without that shared experience, there wouldn't have been a way to connect with another who is more often portrayed as an opponent or an enemy. In Apeirogon, we observe how an Israeli and a Palestinian are brought together through such a tragedy. 

Colum McCann frames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the real-life stories of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, who both lost daughters and have chosen to mobilize their grief, through the Combatants for Peace organization, to share the details of their experiences and try to model how to bridge what can seem to be insurmountable differences: "Anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war."  

When a story is told time and again, there's depth with each re-telling. You may include new details, begin at a different point, depending on what calls it to mind or the context in which you're sharing. Throughout Apeirogon, we learn snippets, and at each mention, there can be a new insight into what happened, along with familiar repetitions. At times the framing and the short bursts of story being revealed and then revisited might have me wondering who was who again, but the details did convey the experience, the reality of how disjointed loss can be, how it transforms you.

In a time when our differences seem so profound and unity so unattainable, when "the ignorance of violence" appears to be the default, I find myself challenged to remain vulnerable, to remain hopeful that with effort, with empathy and with vulnerability, there can be a better way forward. McCann's writing style connected with me, and I find myself continually coming back to this line: "It's a disaster to discover the humanity of your enemy, his nobility, because then he is not your enemy anymore, he just can't be."

After any tragic event, there's the reality that our minds won't be able to grasp the magnitude of the situation. How can we understand the continual assault of escalating, retributive violence in the Middle East? How do we reckon with our history of lynching? How do we comprehend the 3,000 lost on 9/11? Or how about the nearly one million lives lost worldwide (over 200,000 of those American lives) at this point due to Covid-19? It's too much to encapsulate and we can become callous. But we can humanize and grieve when we look smaller, at the individual level, and open ourselves to hearing one story about a life no longer here, then another one, then another. We learn details that make the situation real. The New York Times chose to mark the loss of 100,000 Americans to Covid-19 by listing the names of 1000 now dead and a short phrase from their obituary. The faceless name might be meaningless to me, but reading, "great-grandmother with an easy laugh" or "sharecropper's son" humanizes them in a way the grand scale couldn't. It breaks our hearts. I think of the pastor of a small congregation, of the immigrant restaurant owner, now both gone due to Covid. I didn't know them individually, but I have friends who did know these individuals, who are saddened and changed by the loss. And that makes their reality invade mine. I cannot be callous, I cannot disregard the heartache when it comes near to me.

There are poignant, powerful truths in Apeirogon that I find myself revisiting, particularly in this reality we find ourselves in, where a pandemic rages and division is rampant. Life may be messy with the most acute of losses in store, but there are possible answers for a better way forward. To fail to do so, to continue on in this status quo ripe with division, is not sustainable, for, "We cannot imagine the harm we're doing by not listening to one another and I mean this on every level."  

(I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

3.5, rounded up.

My sincere gratitude to Random House and Netgalley for the ARC, in exchange for this honest review.

It took me an unconscionably long time to get around to reading this, and only its Booker nod finally impelled me to open its pages, as I had a feeling it might not be a book I could fully embrace, given both its subject matter and its reputation as being a quasi-novel, teetering on the brink of reportage. And those things did prevent me from giving in wholeheartedly to the book, as well as its structure - which was both overly schematic, and yet 'kitchen-sink', throwing in lots of tangential material that sometimes blatantly hit you over the head with significance, and at other times made one scramble for the relevance. However, often these 'tangentials' proved more interesting to me than the main story, I must admit. The elliptical structure also worked against it for me, - the introduction of facts or a motif, and then circling back to them hundreds of pages later is a technique I really don't like - for me it impedes any forward momentum, and I feel like I am stuck in second gear. McCann has gone on record as saying plot is the least of his concerns when writing, but it tends to take precedence for me, so it just seems to be a poor match of author and reader here.

Still, one cannot deny the powerful story at the center of the book, and its importance in suggesting a way through not only the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but also for similar war-torn territories. So bottom-line, it is a book I certainly admired - but couldn't say I really enjoyed reading. I DO fully expect it to make the Booker shortlist however, and would not be surprised should it win.

I love the writing in this, so much. I love the bits of the story I can gather, but I've set this down (and picked it back up) so many times. The structure isn't my favorite! I like a more linear story and find it confusing to follow.

Colum McCann has written another wonderful book. His characters are perfectly drawn and the subject matter couldn't be more timely. Highly recommended.

It's an okay novel, it will be well-liked by people who are entranced with the history, war and people of the area mentioned.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

LONGLIST FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE

Despite offering a balanced account of the Middle East conflict, focusing on the tragic stories of two fathers, one Palestinian (Bassam) and one Israeli (Rami), each having lost a daughter in the conflict, Colum McCann’s celebrated APEIROGON minces no words that the ultimate culprit, the ultimate villain in his story, is the Occupation of Palestinian lands by Israeli forces. McCann doesn’t hammer us over the head with this point, but rather lets his protagonists get us there, who repeatedly recall every detail that surrounded the deaths of their children, to the point of forensic precision, a way for them to understand what mechanically has happened to their child so that they can begin to grapple with the why. Bassam and Rami, who could easily have descended into unfettered anger and desire for vengeance, instead become voices for peace, working together to tell their stories both inside their borders and internationally, exposing the humiliation and brutality associated with occupation and that in the end there is no peace and security that comes out of this, only victimhood across both peoples.

There is no question that McCann is a wonderful writer and the story he tells in 1000 chapters (many just a sentence long, some a paragraph, some longer) is a glimpse into the conflict that may reach audiences McCann can access and others cannot. My issues with this book, however, are not in quality as much as what it represents. Despite the occasional flourishes of flowery prose, it reads like narrative non fiction, almost journalistic in quality, and as such as a work of fiction it worked less well for me, lacked the magic that fiction can create.

Before delving into that, I do want to grapple with some other issues that others have brought up.
The first is the issue of cultural appropriation and others have sought to call McCann out for writing a story that is others to tell. This issue has been much debated in literary circles, especially as communities who have had their stories told to them have challenged who is constructing the narratives of their histories, who is exposing their intimacies. These concerns are legitimate and I don’t believe that dismissing it with the quip “people can write whatever they want” has merits, since having McCann write this story means that he does take a spot away from another author. A publisher could choose to publish a story of a less known Palestinian author or a well established commodity like McCann and they are likely to choose the latter for commercial reasons. That said, I’m not opposed to authors telling other’s stories, the question is always whether they do their homework, are sensitive to their perspective as an outsider, and don’t resort to stereotypes. APEIROGON is definitely no AMERICAN DIRT in this respect. McCann elevates the real voices of Bassam and Rami, he relies heavily on testimonies and researched texts. It’s a thoughtful and respectful telling of others stories and as such this would not be a criticism I have of the book. That said, we should not lose sight of the larger publishing implications of having McCann tell this story rather than someone who may have more intimate connection to the subject matter but will never find a publisher to tell their story.

The second issue, which is the huge elephant in the room, is the accusation of sexual misconduct that has bee levelled toward McCann. Roxanne Gay and others have brought this up on twitter and it’s a charge that should not be treated lightly. This is an accusation of course, not proven, and whether it should play any role in how we appreciate art is heavily debated. I’m personally done with the act of separating artists and art though. Fiction is supposed to, among other things, promote empathy and if you go out and behave in ways that are antithetical to empathy, then yes it will colour my view of the text as a reader. I found out of the accusations just as I began the book, and admittedly it did leave a sour taste in my mouth. That may not be fair to the novel, but it is what it is.

Despite this, I did manage to appreciate the text and it was moving. However, I am still not convinced this is a work of fiction or if there are moments of fiction, those are considerably weaker and persuasive than the more fact based accounts of Bassam and Rami’s story. I admittedly listened to the audiobook (narrated very well by McCann), which meant that I could not see the text and this may have impacted how I interpreted it. From the beginning McCann acknowledges that this story was largely based on accounts provided by Bassam and Rami and in fact the middle section are direct transcripts of their stories. McCann insists that this is the base but built upon it is his fiction. I found his fiction hard to find and when it emerged it was not the least compelling part of the book. Most of the text appears to be accounts of the protagonists’ life experiences and then the days and weeks surrounding the deaths of their daughters (which would have been directly from the protagonists accounts). Interspersed are factoids about various things (the history of explosives, the history of rubber bullets and tear gas, the history of Israel’s creation) that read as encyclopedic entries rather than accounts through McCann’s voice. There are occasional philosophical ruminations but again, is this fiction? McCann’s decision to structure his book in these very short chapters also means that he never lets his own prose get much momentum, and when it does it quickly comes to an end, cut off by another factoid or account of Bassam and Rami. In the end, I found the most compelling writing to be the non-fiction bits and was annoyed whenever McCann interrupted it with his own voice, his own efforts to insert his fiction.

If this had sold itself as a work of narrative non-fiction the rating would have been higher (a 4 or 4.5) but it insists it is a work of fiction and as such I judge it as that and it frankly does not work as well as a novel. It never had the magic that we get from fiction, the poetry, the enveloping prose that lets us examine the truths of the human experience and not just facts. APEIROGON, unfortunately, is a greatly flawed novel because it failed to produce that magic.

This is a novel certainly based on fact.....certainly this scenario has played out many times. Lovely, heartbreaking and touching.

McCann has a very nice voice for audio books. The short chapters and nonlinear plot (what plot there was) did not lend themselves to the audio format. I enjoyed learning about 220 and 284, those friendly numbers.

Apeirogon is an interesting book about a true friendship between an Israeli man and a Palestinian man. Ten years apart these fathers lost a daughter to extreme violence. The format of this book is very interesting because it is written as 1001 stories like Shehrazad's tales. Some of these stories are just pictures, a couple of words, or a list of things. The are also stories about birds, buildings, as well as the main characters but all of them blend together to tell a hopeful story with a great sense of setting.

Bassam is a Palestinian man who used to be a combatant in the struggle between Israel and Palestine but during his seven years in jail as a young man he started to educate himself on the Hebrew language and the holocaust. Several years later his 10 year old daughter, Abir, was hit by a rubber bullet in the back of the head and was killed.

Rami is an Israeli man who is a seventh generation Jerusalemite as well as a son of a holocaust victim. He has long believed that there should be no conflict. One day he losses his only daughter to a suicide bombing but this does not change his opinion, in fact him and his wife blame the Israeli government.

Bassam and Rami start to speak out about what is going on and develop a deep friendship. Their sons also being to do the same. This is such a great story of hope and the desire for change based on real men that should be known.

Although not a traditional retelling of a true story through fiction, this is an extremely moving and thought-provoking novel with a complicated and difficult subject. Two fathers and families, one Israeli and one Palestinian, lose young daughters to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and how the men become friends and colleagues in their quest for peace is a book not to be missed.

A brilliant and moving composition of the stories of two men, one a Jew and one an Arab, who lost daughters to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. These are real people. Rami is a Jewish graphic designer in Jerusalem whose 13-year old daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bombing; Bassam is a Palestinian in the West Bank whose 10-year old daughter Abir was killed outside a candy store by a rubber bullet fired by an overzealous teenager in the Israeli Defense Force. The narrative of this creative A weaving of many vignettes of their lives before and after their loss, their struggles with their grief, and the paths they took to become friends through work with a peace group. In the process we come to feel the similar humanity, myths, and culture of the two peoples claiming the same land and the hope of some end to the oppressive and corrupting impact of one maintaining an “Occupation” of the other in the name of security.

The format is a sequence of 1001 “chapters” or stories, in reference to the “Thousand and One Arabian Nights”, that ancient compilation of stories told by a woman to defer being killed (“a ruse for life in the face of death”). Many are just a sentence or two, and the longest are two chapters numbered “500”, which comprise the full text of the stories told by the two real-life fathers at a peace meeting held at a monastery in the West Bank. These are about 15 pages each, with similar beginnings: “My name is Rami Elhanan. I am the father of Smadar.”/“My name is Bassam Aramin, I am the father of Abir.“ Interposed between the two is a chapter labelled “1001”, a full page summary in a single sentence of how “Once upon a time, and not so long ago, and not so far away”, Rami travelled by motorcycle from Jerusalem across the border wall to speak at the meeting with Bassam to people from diverse countries, who found:
"within their stories another story, a song of songs, discovering themselves—in the stone-tiled chapel where we sit for hours, eager, hopeless, buoyed, confused, cynical, complicit, silent, our memories imploding, our synapses skipping, in the gathering dark, remembering, while listening, all of those stories that are yet to be told."

Lovely structure and powerful emotional lift as I, the reader, becomes a “we” at the scene. After the two father’s stories, the chapters count down back to “1”. As if we can go forward by winding back and somehow undo the property seizures and violence in 1948 that first set the conflict into an impossible knot. Rami’s motorcycle bears a bumper sticker which says: “It will not be over until we talk.” A bit of a twist on speaking to stay alive by the woman in the Arabian Nights. Rami is eloquent in his metaphors:

"We cannot imagine the harm we do by not listening to one another, and I mean this on every level. It is immeasurable. We may have built up our wall, but the wall is really in our minds, and every day I put a crack in another one."

At one point, Bassam travels to America and gets a chance to visit with Secretary of State John Kerry, to whom he points out:
"I’m sorry to tell you, Senator, but you murdered my daughter."

In a parallel example of bravery in reaching for the big picture, Rami’s wife Nurit receives a call of condolence from Netanayu, to which she responds:
"The killing was not the fault of the bombers. … The bombers were victims too. Israel is culplable. The blood was on its hands."

An interesting twist in Bassam’s life was inspired by seeing a film on the Holocaust while he was imprisoned in his youth for impulsively throwing some old, defunct hand grenades that he found at an Israeli military jeep.
"And I began to think, reluctantly at first, that so much of the Israeli mind must have stemmed from that. …We, the Palestinians, became the victims of victims."

Though he gets beaten a lot and goes on a hunger strike in resistance, he gets insight from learning that his Jewish jailers really did believe that the Palestinians had taken their land. He comes to see both sides as twisted by ideology. He later gets a scholarship for a masters degree program in England in Holocaust studies.

Some readers are displeased with the fractured and non-linear presentation in this book. They complain of seemingly arbitrary jumps to vignettes from history and insights from various poets and thinkers. Stories of the tragic ironies at the showcase concentration camp, Theresienstadt, Borges’ struggle to imagine a repository of all knowledge, John Cage’s attempts to incorporate silence and random elements into his music, Goethe’s analogies between music and architecture, Einstein’s dialogue by letter with Freud over a solution to the violence in human nature. I loved every one of these “diversions”, finding each to relate to making meaning in this world. Quite a few of these “asides” relate to the natural environment in common to Israel and Palestine, such as migratory birds, which know nothing of borders, and bird lovers, who risk their lives to experience them. The paucity of water and money interest in its control is another theme.

Three sideways threads in this narrative collage relate to subjects of previous books by McCann, all quite appropriate for placement in this wonderfully creative book. The Frenchman, Petit, who features as a high-wire walker between NYC skyscrapers in “Let the Great World Spin” appears in this narrative doing a similar walk on a cable across a valley between Israel and Palestine. A real human metaphor of crossing the divide, replete with a white dove of peace, which ironically nearly causes him a fatal fall. Another couple of sections features the multicultural tunnel diggers, the “sandhogs”, at work in Israel as they did making train tunnels in Manhattan in McCann’s “This Side of Brightness”. The third connection is a revisit with the American ex-Senator George Mitchell in his successful efforts to mediate the peace accord between Britain and the IRA in the early 1990s, which was featured in McCann’s “TransAtlantic” (my favorite of 4 books I’ve read by the author). The resolution to a long history of oppression and violence makes a clear model for the seeming impossibility of peace between Israel and Palestine.

The combination of pathos for individual victims of tragedy and connections to a larger stories of the human condition and to a lyrical perspective on our place in the world made this a great read for me.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.