This brilliant book, surely a serious contender for the 2019 Booker Prize, is a “hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling, which like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination”.

At its heart is the true story of Rami (and Smadar) and Bassam (and Abir)

http://withineyeofstorm.com/about-the-characters/

One Thousand and One Nights is an explicit inspiration not just for the storytelling of the book, but for its fascinating structure. It is told in 1001 number paragraphs – firstly counting up to 500 and then back down.

The first half of the novel has as its narrative underpinning, the journey Rami takes on his motorbike to the meeting above, a meeting at which Rami and Bassam do what they do around the world – tell the stories of their daughter’s deaths, of their own mental journeys and of their plea for dialogue, understanding and peace.

The second half is underpinned by Bassam’s journey home after the meeting.

The middle part is the two lengthy, and powerful accounts, that Rami and Bassam give at the meeting – accounts which we have already largely pieced together from the first part of the book, and which are then further explored on in the second half, but which are set out here in full detail.

From the accounts and the book we get a strong sense of the kinship that Rami and Bassam have reached through their tragedies.

All of the above would make for a memorable and powerful piece of writing – however what also makes it exceptional literature is the way in which the 500 sections take elements of the stories of Rami and Bassam as a point to weave a web of connections, connections which then in turn give us a deeper understanding of their stories.

These connections draw on modern and ancient history, geography, ornithology, mathematics, language, science, politics and so much more.

It is really hard to do justice to the book and the way in which these connections are both scattered and then gathered together – sometimes via symbolism, sometimes bringing in the terrible reality of violence, and sometimes juxtaposing the two.

But perhaps one example will give an idea.

A terrible section tells of the work of Zaka Orthodox paramedics to gather up body parts after the suicide bombing which kills Smadar – the paramedics have to return to pick up an eyeball (of one of the bombers) spotted by an elderly man – Moti Richter. The eyeball has parts of the optic nerve attached and reminds Richter we are told of a “tiny old fashioned motorcycle lamp with wires dangling”. Via discussions of eye surgery, we go to the hospital where Abir is dying and Bassam is asked if (were the worse to happen) he would consent to an eye transplant. Via rubber bullets (one of which killed Abir) we visit the death of Goliath, the mushroom effect of suicide bombers. The book explores the tightrope walk of the high wire artist Phillipe Petit (the subject of one of the author’s earlier novels) across Jerusalem, following in the path of a cable used by the Jewish forces to sneak supplies over hostile territory in the 1948 War. Moti was a guard for this cable – and at night would patrol under the cable to ensure it was still working on a motorcycle (which in turn reminds us of Rami’s journey) which had its headlight disconnected – and which sat by his bedside “with its wires dangling”.

Another example – at one point McCann discusses “The Conference of the Birds” (a story incidentally which is the second crucial inspiration for Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte”) – a story in which a long journey seeking enlightenment ends with the birds finding only their own reflections – an analogy I think for Rami and Bassam’s realisation that only recognising something of your own reflection in “the other” will ever really bring peace, as a bumper sticker on Rami’s motorcycle says “It will not be over until we talk”

Very highly recommended. There may be books in 2020 which give an equally brilliant literary treatment to an equally powerful story and with an equally important message. If so then 2020 will be a vintage year for literature.

One of the most affecting and important books I have read for a long time. The story of two fathers, one from Israel, one from Palestine who lose their daughters and in their unimaginable grief, unite to set up an organisation to help others and to promote peace. This is a tale of heartbreak, courage and bravery written beautifully and never descending into mawkishness or sentimentality.

From the acknowledgements:

”This is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination…”

There is a core story being told in Apeirogon. On 4 September 1997, Smadar Elhanan was killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem. On 16 January 2007, Abir Aramin was leaving school with friends in Anata when she was hit in the head by a rubber bullet. She died in hospital. The fathers of these two girls, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, became friends and joined forces to work for peace in one of the world’s most troubled places.

So much is known fact:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/aug/03/men-kill-children-middle-east-israel-palestine

Apeirogon is the story of these two men. In part of the story, we follow the men almost chronologically through a day, but this is mixed with a multitude of flashbacks that fill in the details for the reader jumping around in time. We revisit some events numerous times, adding details and fresh perspectives as we go. It feels like McCann has hit the story with a hammer and carefully picked up the small pieces (there are multiple references to shrapnel through the book) and constructed something new from them.

But Apeirogon is a lot more than this. Because, as well as reconstructing the story of Aramin and Elhanan, McCann has taken a multitude of other threads, hit them all with hammers, and mixed all the pieces together before he starts re-constructing. The novel consists of 1001 fragments varying from a few pages to just a few words. Some are pictures. This means we read about bird migration, the music of John Cage, a 19th-century explorer of the Jordan river, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk over Jerusalem (https://apnews.com/017df269d150fd80d1774fad89827105), Borges’ visit to Jerusalem, and many, many other things. McCann sees connections, some of them poetic rather than literal, and presents us with a mixture, as he says, of fact and imagination that gives the reader a poetic perspective that is often profoundly moving.

It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. Its page count suggests it is a long book, but there is a lot of white space and it doesn’t feel long (I have seen some review quotes that suggest it is too long, but that was not my experience of the book).

This is the kind of novel that is impossible to write about without feeling that you have missed out huge chunks of important information, so all I can really do is suggest you read it. You might like to watch this video clip where Bassam’s son Arab and Rami’s son Yigal share the stage together as they seek to continue their fathers’ work: https://youtu.be/oJllnXxS41M.

‘We live our lives, suggested Rilke, in widening circles that reach out across the expanse.’

Sometimes a book just hits you, reminding us why we do this. This human impulse to write, to explain, to tell stories, to explore why things just are. The basic premise is simple: two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, travel separately to a monastery in the town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, where they will both talk about their experiences of losing a child to the violence, and then they travel home again. From this, Colum McCann has created an extraordinary book that almost defies definition. The two central characters are real, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, and McCann has used extracts from interviews they have given to form the central core of the novel, the two stories from the men. In his acknowledgments at the end of the book, McCann writes:

‘This is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination.’

The title, too, gives us a way of trying to understand the book:

‘As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible. Even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, the entirety of the shape is complicit.’

The book counts up, in 500 short passages, and then counts down, in 500 more – some just one sentence, some a few pages – and weaves back and forward in time as we learn the stories behind their loss. Bassam’s daughter Abir was killed by a bullet fired by an eighteen-year-old Israeli soldier; Rami’s daughter Smadar was killed by one of three suicide bombers. At different times, the hospital to where Abir was taken and then died was the same hospital where Smadar had been born: ‘One story becoming another’. Both men end up joining the Parents Circle, a group of people from all sides in the conflict who have lost children, and this gives both men not only comfort and a place to talk, but also a meaning and a purpose.

McCann weaves in a remarkable collage of references, from birds to popular music to historical figures. Everything is connected, the very fragmentary nature of the book giving us an intense magnification of a singular fact or moment; zoom out and the fragments start to take shape. The book is very much from the point of view of the two men, a male discourse in which we see the daughters and the wives, but only through another perspective. Rami’s wife, Nurit, is a university professor, and she indeed has written on the subject of the conflict (which McCann cites in the course of the book). Bassam’s wife, Salwa, chooses not to speak out, choosing devotion and supplication to try to understand. Whilst the novel lacks their voices, they are not superfluous characters, and I think McCann does the daughters and the wives justice.

Myth-making and creation stories; photographs; mathematical analysis of amicable numbers; seemingly random stories and real-life characters; and birds, so many references and allusions to birds. McCann’s novel is an ambitious, multi-layered and extraordinary work. Like a recurring theme, the book of ‘Arabian Nights’ comes up again and again, and indeed the fragments in the novel number 1001.

It’s almost impossible to describe this. Like a murmuration of starlings, or a musical theme, there are ripples, connections, associations, juxtapositions. The writing is lyrical and heart-breaking at one moment, clinical and observant at another. The layers and different perspectives give the reader, ultimately, a remarkable picture of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and its utterly human cost. It may have imperfections, but this is a simply remarkable tour-de-force from Colum McCann, a genre-defying, profoundly moving and remarkable piece of writing that will haunt you long after you finish it. Some books you simply must read. This is one of them.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)