Importantly, Bassam and Rami are real people: the traumas they endure in the novel, their quests for revenge, and then justice, and then peace, have all really happened. Years later, in 1997, his daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing on Ben Yehuda Street, during the Second Intifada. As a young man, he participated in the violence of the Yom Kippur War, and learned what it meant to kill someone. Years before his daughter’s death, Rami, a descendent of a Holocaust survivor and a second-generation adoptee into an old Jerusalemite family, was an apolitical graphic designer. His dream is proven a mirage when, at the age of 10, his daughter Abir is killed by an Israeli soldier shooting rubber bullets out of the back of a jeep. When he is released, he desires nothing more than to marry and have children, seeing in family the promise of a kind of liberty. He learns all too well how Israel forces Palestinians into a Hobson’s choice over their freedom. Having spent seven years in prison for a failed grenade assault on IDF soldiers, Bassam is the walking image of the effects of the Occupation. It tells the story of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan - a Palestinian and an Israeli, respectively - who have both come to a similar position against the Israeli occupation of Palestine after losing their daughters to its senseless violence. The plot itself is both simple and uncommon for the novel form. This is, more or less, how McCann asks us to read Apeirogon. Phenomena are fixed in place and time the value of the idea, then, is that it is one plausible map to the objects of its consideration - a way of illuminating the relations between them. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin wrote that “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.” He meant that the ideas that allow us to give meaning to objects and phenomena are no more present among those objects than constellations are among the stars above. And when ambition is the word, one hopes to watch it dissolve behind something challenging, breathtaking, and maybe even new. It is a tale saturated with the mid-career ambition of a celebrated author. His latest novel, Apeirogon - named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides - is a collection of these and other curiosities, made to ring intelligibly around a central narrative of anger, loss, compassion, and solidarity. DID YOU KNOW that François Mitterand’s final meal was an ortolan, cooked whole - a traditional French dish thought to be so shameful to eat that the diner must cover his head with a napkin while chewing? Or that, when a suicide bomber activates his vest, his head usually separates from his body, a phenomenon known as the mushroom effect? Or that a frigatebird can stay aloft for two months without touching down?Ĭolum McCann wants to tell you these things.

Apeirogon review