February 22, 2024

Excuse me if I sound a bit breathless, but I just finished reading Apeirogon by Colum McCann, and it is stunning, superb. I had not heard of this book, which was published in 2020, but then in the last couple months a good friend, who is one of my most reliable book sources, and another someone, whom I can’t recall, mentioned this book. I added it to my TBR list and then during a recent bookstore indulgence, there it was.

First order of business: What is an “apeirogon”? Is it a person, place, or thing? A made-up word?

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity. Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on, and even though the counting will take forever one can still get to any point in the universe in a finite amount of time.

p. 82

Make sense? No, I don’t really understand it either, except that this book challenged me to open to more possibilities, more sides, more understandings than I could imagine.

Set that aside for the moment.

The story, based on a true story: Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They each lose a daughter to violence. Abir is killed in 2007 by a rubber bullet when she is ten, and Smadar is 13 when she becomes the victim of suicide bombers in 1997. These bereft fathers meet and decide to share their stories, which they do over and over again and all over the world. Their core message, which is repeated multiple times, is “It will not be over until we talk.”

The story is moving, as is the wisdom because of the story.

Rami says:

The first choice is obvious: revenge. When someone kills your daughter, you want to get even. You want to go out and kill an Arab, any Arab, all Arabs, and then you want to try and kill his family and anyone else around him, it’s expected, it’s demanded. Every Arab you see, you want him dead. Of course you don’t always do this in a real sense, but you do this by asking other people to kill this Arab for you, your politicians, your so-called leaders. You ask them to slam a missile into his house, to poison him, to take his land, to steal his water, to arrest his son, to beat him up at the checkpoints. If you kill one of mine, I will kill ten of yours. And the dead one, naturally, has an uncle or a brother or a cousin or a wife who wants to kill you back and then you want to kill them back again, another ten times over. Revenge. It’s the simplest way. And then you get monuments to that revenge, with mourners’ tents, songs, placards on the walls, another riot, another checkpoint, another piece of land stolen. A stone leads to a bullet. And another suicide bomber leads to another air strike. And it goes on and on. And on.

p. 220

Bassam says:

You see the Occupation exists in every aspect of your life, an exhaustion and a bitterness that nobody outside it really understands. It deprives you of tomorrow. It stops you from going to the market, to the hospital, to the beach, to the sea. You can’t walk, you can’t drive, you can’t pick up an olive from your own tree which is on the other side of the barbed wire. You can’t even look up in the sky. They have their planes up there. They own the air above and the ground below. You need a permit to sow your land. Your door is kicked in, your house is taken over, they put their feet on your chairs. Your seven-year-old is picked up and interrogated…Most Israelis don’t even know this happens. It’s not that they’re blind. They just don’t know what is being done in their name…They can’t travel in the West Bank. They have no idea how we are living. But it happens every day. Every single day…

It’s a tragedy that we need to continually prove that we are human beings. Not only to the Israelis, but also for other Arabs, our brothers and sisters, to the Americans, to the Chinese, the Europeans. Why is that? Do I not look human? Do I not bleed man? We are not special. We are a people, just like any other.

pp. 236-237

A Unique Structure

The structure in the book is almost a character itself. The whole of the book is made up of small numbered sections. Some are only a line long and others a page or two. The content of these sections is not only the basic story, but also references to nature and art and philosophy and history and literature and other peoples’ stories–all suggesting the interconnection of everything and everyone. And not once did I feel bored. Not once did I wonder when the “real” story would continue. Did I understand every reference? No, but I was always intrigued.

But here’s how the plot is even more unique. In the first half the book the sections build from #1 to #500. Then there is a section #1001. Only much later does the reader understand the significance of that number. Then the section numbers decrease from #500 to #1. And sometimes a section in one half of the book is related to the same number in the other half of the book. I kept wondering if the author had a huge dry erase board where he kept track of the content. This method did not feel contrived or created for its own sake. Instead, it added to the interconnection of everything and everyone.

This is a novel for our time and one that contributes in a deep and powerful way as a way to understand, if that is possible, the current chaos.

I feel a need to fast before opening another book. I probably won’t do that, for my reading addiction is always present, but I do know this book will preoccupy and even haunt me.

An Invitation

What books have haunted you long after you’ve read them? I would love to know.