Apeirogon
A Novel
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4.0 • 20 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From celebrated Irish writer Colum McCann comes a dazzling new novel set in Occupied Palestine and Israel. In an astonishing act of the imagination, McCann illuminates the political situation that has riven the region for more than seventy years in a completely new light. Using a fascinating blend of real events and people, he fictionalizes their stories. As the author says, “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.”
McCann tells the story of Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and how they came together after the terrible loss of both of their daughters, one to suicide bombers and the other to Israeli police. Parents from both sides who have lost loved ones gather together in a Parents Circle to tell their stories, to heal, and to never forget their unimaginable losses.
Deploying a myriad of seemingly unrelated historical, cultural and biographical snapshots, this highly original and inventive novel reframes the never-ending Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The result is a breath-taking narrative based on events that actually happened.
McCann says, “Bassam and Rami have allowed me to shape and reshape their worlds. Despite these liberties, I hope to remain true to the actual realities of their shared experiences.”
Apeirogon is a completely mesmerizing novel. Driven by a compelling voice, Colum McCann has written a powerful and haunting narrative that is simply masterful in its universal implications.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award winner McCann (Let the Great World Spin) bases this masterful novel on the lives of two real men working together toward Middle Eastern peace. Rami Elhanan, 67 on the single day of 2016 on which the main narrative takes place, is a graphic designer and Israeli military veteran. In September 1997, his 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing. His need for revenge fades when he joins the Parents' Circle, whose members, of many nationalities and religions, have all lost a child in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nineteen years younger than Elhanan, Palestinian Bassam Aramin is jailed in 1985, at 17, for resisting the Israeli occupiers in Hebron, where he's raised. During his imprisonment, writings by Gandhi, among others, and friendship with one of the Israeli guards convince him of the power of nonviolence. Released after seven years, he helps found Combatants for Peace, which brings Palestinian and Israeli fighters among them Elhanan's son, who introduces the two men together for dialogue. The fatal 2005 shooting of Bassam's 10-year-old daughter, Abir, by an Israeli border guard doesn't shake his belief that Israelis and Palestinians share "an equity of pain"; he and Elhanan begin meeting daily, using their daughters' stories to become international advocates for peace. The book's title is a reference to a polygon with a countable but infinite number of sides, and McCann evokes the experience of its protagonists and their region through 1,001 brief numbered segments that incorporate sequences in the men's own voices and interconnect topics including bullet manufacturing, Jorge Luis Borges, and birds. 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.)
