The novel pivots on a single day in 2016, when the two men travel to a meeting of the Parents Circle in a Cremisan monastery in Beit Jala. The number of chapters is a reference to the 1,001 Arabian Nights – “a ruse for life in the face of death”. The central chapters of the novel are deeply moving interviews with each of the protagonists: “elsewhere in this book,” McCann says in an author’s note, “Bassam and Rami have allowed me to shape and reshape their words and worlds”. Both men join the Parents Circle, a group of the fellow-bereaved who unite in their sorrow to press for a peaceful resolution to the conflict: “This became their jobs: to tell the story of what had happened to their girls.”Īpeirogon is structured as 1,001 individual chapters, some as short as a sentence, some comprising Sebald-like photographs, some merely blank spaces (a reflection of one of the mathematical theorems that underlie the novel). A Palestinian, studying the Holocaust.” The men are united in their grief – they lost their daughters: Smadar, turned into “a scattered human jigsaw” at the age of 13 by a suicide bomber, and Abir, assassinated aged 10 by a trigger-happy member of the Israeli army. In 2009, he published the wildly successful Let the Great World Spin, which won a National Book award and the Impac prize and was translated into 40 languages.Īpeirogon takes its inspiration from the real-life friendship between a Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and an Israeli, Rami Elhanan: “An Israeli, against the occupation. You don’t read Apeirogon so much as feel it – the particular tragedies are lived out in an ever-present moment of loss 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.

But perhaps that’s the point – the desperation of the situation has brought forth a work of art whose beauty, intelligence and compassion may go some way to changing things. Now each side has retreated into belligerent isolation, with Donald Trump gleefully fanning the flames of discord. In the optimistic 90s we had the Oslo Accords and a real sense that some solution to the conflict could be found through diplomatic channels. It feels as if the situation in the Middle East is always a reflection of its age.

It’s a strange time for a novel as full-hearted as Apeirogon. The title is taken from the mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides”, a shape that serves as a model for a new way of thinking about a conflict that is too often reduced to simple, opposed positions. Colum McCann has written something he calls a “hybrid novel,” in which the form’s mutability, its stance on both sides and neither, is used to address the entrenched positions of the Middle East.

Apeirogon review