...[a] powerful and prismatic new novel.... This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters...reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows ... these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness ... They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and the most difficult to read ... McCann’s brilliant act of novel-making builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around Rami’s and Bassam’s first-person accounts, a rich and comprehensive context that allows us into the fathers’ experiences, their histories, their minds ... the novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project ... Reading Apeirogon we move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside; we begin to share it ... Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener ... it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves. It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it’s indisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It does far more than make an argument for peace; it is, itself, an agent of change.
It’s a strange time for a novel as full-hearted as Apeirogon. It feels as if the situation in the Middle East is always a reflection of its age ... Now each side has retreated into belligerent isolation, with Donald Trump gleefully fanning the flames of discord. 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. 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 ... You don’t read Apeirogon so much as feel it, as the particular tragedies of Bassam and Rami are lived out in an ever-present moment of loss ... For all its grief, Apeirogon is a novel that buoys the heart. The friendship of Bassam and Rami is a thing of great and sustaining beauty ... This, the novel suggests, is the solution to the conflict: something as simple and easy as friendship, as the acknowledgement of a shared experience, as love. I kept thinking as I read it about all the ways that Apeirogon could have failed, about the ammunition it might have provided to all of those who claim that no one should write a novel that reaches beyond their own particular experience. It could have been maudlin, tawdry, exploitative, trite. Instead, it’s a masterpiece, a novel that will change the world, and you don’t hear that very often.
This remarkable, complex novel demonstrates what has become a tenet of its author’s work: 'One story becoming another,' as he writes ... McCann is adept at transforming history into fiction in a way that brings the reader to view that history anew; he is a writer who forges connections that would otherwise go unseen ...
With Apeirogon, this bold novelist enters fraught political territory with courage and imagination. There is no simple way to approach this kind of material, and so McCann takes the novel form and cracks it open: the book is composed of 1,000 chapters, some only a single line long. They are numbered up to 500 before heading back down to one again — recognition that stories such as those of Elhanan and Aramin can have no linear trajectory. Yet McCann ensures that as the novel expands and folds back in on itself, the reader never feels lost: one of the book’s feats is the way that clarity of exposition is combined with formal experimentation ... Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides ... It’s a clumsy title for a novel, one might argue, a title requiring explanation. Still, this remarkable book rises to embody the geometric form, folding an uncountable number of stories within itself, the lives of Palestinians and Israelis, stretching back into the past and off into the future. It is a daring, humane achievement.
McCann’s fiction is wide-ranging and international in scope. Here his style takes on a modernist ethos in the vastness of his canvas and its multiplicity of angles ... The fragmented telling of Apeirogon is driven by McCann’s desire to foster understanding and ultimately, that elusive ideal: peace ... Readers are offered respite from the depictions of daily perils and struggles in the luminous descriptions of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ visit to Jerusalem or Bassam’s trip to England where he feels the pull of exile ... Apeirogon is a weighty read, yet it’s suffused with hope. Beyond the seemingly intractable problem of the Middle East, it speaks to the universal need to recognize the humanity of those who politicians would render merely the enemy.
McCann takes their story and drops it to the ground, where it shatters. To read Apeirogon is to watch him pick up the shards ... The Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek, writing on Twitter, recently called 'storytelling' a 'jazz-hands word.' Apeirogon is a jazz-hands novel ... You sense you would like Rami and Bassam if you got to know them. But we are not allowed to settle into the texture and nuance of their experience. We’re evicted from the narrative on almost every page so that McCann can tweezer in arty and only vaguely relevant facts about birds, or about John Cage’s music, or about the Dead Sea Scrolls or the derivation of the word 'dextrose' ... is so solemn, so certain of its own goodness and moral value, that it tips almost instantly over into camp, into corn. It’s as if the author were gunning for the Paulo Coelho Chair in Maudlin Schlock ... not a meal but a table littered with ingredients ... When you insist on a lot of white space between paragraphs and sometimes between single sentences, and if your work is humid, the effect can unintentionally verge on the amusing. Each sentence has an apricot-colored scarf tied around its neck. And it’s as if the reader has been given 10 seconds and a bong hit between each one; time to squint and nod and say, 'So true' ... [McCann's] analysis of the predicaments that face the Middle East is not raw or original or sophisticated. His message is optimistic and banal. Apeirogon is like a political memoir that bangs on about the importance of bipartisanship as if the senator had, just this morning, arrived at the idea.
McCann, who began his career as a reporter, examines with skill and empathy the characters’ private agonies as they play out against the backdrop of war; his virtuosic storytelling conjures the confounding realities of the Israeli occupation ... Throughout, there’s a rich tension between the factual and the imagined, and in the way particular tribulations are part of a universal experience ... Apeirogon reminds us that such incandescent art evokes humility and light in the face of oppression and loss.
Apeirogon occupies the unsettled, disputed territory between fact and fiction ... Some of the book’s most affecting moments are the brief glimmers of hope for peace ... The free-associative approach is also reminiscent of the cult documentary maker Adam Curtis, whose films find weird connections between seemingly unrelated moments in history. But McCann’s unpredictable leaps in both form and content often leave your brain feeling more exhausted than enlarged. At times, Apeirogon strains too hard for connections and patterns, which distract and detract from the story’s emotional core. McCann aims to hover over vast tracts of history, but often comes across as flighty instead ... These detours are all the more jarring given his apparent lack of interest in the novel’s female characters. McCann prefers lofty ruminations on male genius ... Apeirogon could have been a lot more powerful had it been shorter and simpler ... But there is beauty and tenderness in McCann’s endeavour ... He has entered into the lives of others and found poetry there.
Pieced together in a sort of narrative pastiche...facts and features and events are told and retold, alluded to and expanded on, until we have seen them from so many angles that the picture they finally make seems at once comprehensively complete and incomprehensibly complex ... The associations that Apeirogon suggests are inescapable, of course, not random at all, but as wide as they ripple and as heady as they sometimes seem, they always come back to the book’s human heart, two grieving fathers and the power of their love in the face of countably infinite odds.
... ambitious ... As in earlier novels, McCann mixes history and fiction, shifting narrators, place and time into a seamless though sprawling whole ... McCann’s protagonists believe that if a country’s commitment to peace leads the way, the most complex politics will sort themselves out. Apeirogon makes space for this belief, a placeholder for a future where irreparable loss transforms violence, where grief leads to reconciliation.
...what appears to be a bloody biographical symmetry does not nearly cover what McCann is attempting with Apeirogon ... The resulting book is arranged in 1,001 numbered sections, like the Arabian Nights, running up to 500 and back down to zero. The longest of these are the most novelistic, rendering Aramin and Elhanan as characters, and building discrete narratives around the facts of their cases ... The tension in those passages between natural empathy and tonal neutrality makes them hot to the touch. Your face burns reading them ... all these semi-digressions build a cumulative power, an almost cosmic sense of context. The meaning of the whole is encoded in every part.
... exceptional ... a moving portrait of the emotions that govern the politics of the region and the tragedies that befell these men and their families ... [McCann] brilliantly incorporates many literary techniques throughout, from sections written in the form of a play to the use of photos that calls to mind W.G. Sebald. He employs metaphors to great effect ... McCann cites many writers, most prominently Borges but also authors such as Mahmoud Darwish and Jerzy Kosiński, whose quoted writings offer added dimension to the depicted events.
The price of such language can be too high, drawing attention to itself in exchange for a fleeting judder of recognition...Still, McCann excels at it ... The book’s subject is the unending conflict in the Middle East, and the author treats it with such careful ferocity that at times he nearly goes quiet. At last he truly does: One of the book’s hundreds of sections is simply a block of black ink, terrible and final. It seems to concede that there’s a place of pain where language ends ... And in this progression toward its own defeat, McCann’s book attains a strange nobility ... a loving, thoughtful, grueling novel ... By now the benefits of this jittery style have come into focus: It allows an author to introduce various ideas and facts without the awkward carpentry that can make traditional novels about politics or history, in particular, seem strained. At the same time, its drawbacks are also plain, among them obscurity, lack of momentum and sententiousness ... McCann walks the line pretty well...Still, there are moments when he briefly returns to his natural gift for storytelling, and they’re the most powerful passages in the book ... To its occasional loss, Apeirogon resists the narrative model, opting instead for an open-ended approach, rhizomatic and searching. Of all contemporary subjects, Israel might be the one for which this choice is most justified, so intricate is its tragic history.
...a kaleidoscopic, wildly ambitious hybrid of fact and fiction ... McCann’s storytelling radiates outward to include everything from meditations on Middle Eastern geography and the history of birds to the last meal of a French president and the lost operas of the Holocaust ... he’s also woven something tensile and beautiful out of terrible pain ... B+.
Some readers may find the refractive structure of the text, and its sheer length, off-putting, but they are probably the kind of people who favour figurative over nonrepresentational art, or easy-listening musical arrangements over modal, atonal or dissonant compositions – in short, those who prefer to spend their free time in pursuits other than engaging with challenging, demanding and unsettling works of art. Such criticism would also fail to take into account the heft of the human story which pulses through these pages ... The courage with which McCann walks his vertiginous tightrope here, given the potential for alienating the more militant on either side, is commendably audacious. He is already, it hardly needs to be reiterated here, one of the finest writers of his generation, Irish or otherwise. Apeirogon can only further consolidate his reputation.
McCann’s novels have an unusually high thread count, weaving together dozens of interconnecting story lines, characters and ideas. Apeirogon is full of real people ... Their stories are tragic, powerful, moving and inspiring ... McCann’s fragmented retellings of Bassam and Rami’s stories are mixed in with such diverse material ... But this book is not a novel. Not because it’s formally daring, or because it deals with real events. A novel can do whatever it wants. And that’s precisely the problem with Apeirogon: McCann does not have freedom of movement. There are some important places that he cannot travel to — hence all the dazzling distraction tactics ... This is a work of creative non-fiction premised on the problematic belief that literature should do good in the world. It is a commendable achievement. It is also ponderous, worthy, sentimental and self-important. The lyrical prose, presumably meant to elevate the subject matter to 'novel' status, is mostly second-rate.
An apeirogon is a multi-sided geometric structure, and so, too, is Apeirogon, the challenging new book by Colum McCann ... Apeirogon's geometry is revealed in 1,001 facets, some just a sentence, others several pages. It is creative non-fiction that honours the realities of the historical fact with, as McCann puts it, 'invention at its core' ... But it is about much more ... Sometimes the bombardment of information seems unrelated to the story. But keep reading, and you will find that everything is connected — and that is precisely the point.
It is a tale saturated with the mid-career ambition of a celebrated author. And when ambition is the word, one hopes to watch it dissolve behind something challenging, breathtaking, and maybe even new ... Importantly, Bassam and Rami are real people ... The book draws its power from this vibrant and actually existing pair. But the true power of the novel lies in its practice of constellating ... The echo resounding from Abir’s and Smadar’s deaths, as captured by McCann, weaves a connective tissue that expands beyond the lives of the two friends, separated by a brutal occupation, and into the breadth and depth of the histories and geographies that are sedimented into the region ... The structure that [McCann] has chosen — a constellation of a thousand and one mosaic-like segments — fails to provide the kind of pressure and heat needed for form to act as an artistic crucible ... nothing set ablaze in the manner of artistic epiphany. This cold slack results in several patches of the novel that manage to constellate only briefly, before spiraling out of reach and disintegrating from the whole ... That said, the novel remains potent, not least for its careful elucidation of Bassam’s and Rami’s heart-wrenching experiences. One begins to wonder, in fact, whether one needs the entire apparatus at all. These are real people, after all, their stories known and true. And when we reach the novel’s center, and are able to read for ourselves their doleful stories and thundering admonitions from their own mouths, it’s tempting to feel that this is all that was needed ... What is most evident in this novel, hanging above it like a nimbus, is how deeply McCann cares — about Rami, Bassam, their families, and also about everyone still forced into the jaws of an unjust system. Also, about birds.
...it’s been no secret that Colum McCann is one of the most compassionate writers alive, but, wow: his new book not only enters the hearts and minds of all its characters; it also validates my faith in the novel as a relentlessly resourceful and powerful form. Apeirogon is a wrenching and repetitive book, structurally inventive ... At its core, this is a fierce and brave rendering of the Middle East crucible from numerous angles ... McCann deftly elides sentiment. Instead...he conveys life’s hard truths effectively and indelibly, shedding new light upon what is both unthinkable and also now frighteningly ordinary—we kill our neighbors’ children every day.I had to keep putting the book down to gather the strength to go on. By repeating their stories, both Bassam and Rami, and also McCann, get to the heart of grief itself, its agonizing tenacity, and the unbearable tedium of its cruelties ... In a cultural moment where the question of who-has-a-right-to-what-story is argued all the time, McCann validates my belief in the writer’s right to go where his obsessions and imagination take him, and, as in this work of fiction studded with fact, to produce myriad, penetrating rays of truth.
Colum McCann’s odd and ambitious book contains almost 500 pages of fact and fiction about the Israel‑Palestine conflict, combined with various quotations, asides, remarks, insights, musings and statements of fact on all manner of subjects, including the working habits of Picasso, the invention and manufacture of rubber bullets, the work of senator George Mitchell during the Northern Ireland peace talks and the correspondence between Einstein and Freud ... The book offers few if any of the usual satisfactions of the novel. But as a compendium of facts, a homage, a kind of creative response to the brave, sad work of Aramin and Elhanan, it is both insightful and moving. The amassing of all the incidental detail is what really adds up...
I don’t know if I’ve ever read a more exhausting book ... is so obsessed with its own significance as to reduce its big story to a laborious performance of authorial ego. Reading it is like listening to an erudite conspiracy theorist explain their thesis of the universe, the thesis being that just about every meaningful thing that has ever happened is connected, and connected specifically to Israel and Palestine. The idea that those places are by nature capital-M Meaningful too often substitutes for an attempt to really see, or question, what that meaning might be. McCann, in Apeirogon, has taken that substitution to a new extreme ... McCann’s use of trivia can be impressive ... McCann exploits his form as he exploits his subject, treating its vastness as a substitute for many of the things a reader might wish for: character development, emotional nuance, real thoughtfulness ... one of the tragedies of Apeirogon is how, in trying to exult Aramin and Elhanan’s bravery, McCann makes it seem empty ... The book sometimes hints at what it could be, if McCann had been less preoccupied by the enormity of his vision.
The tale of these friends in mourning resists simple storytelling expectations such as beginnings and endings and is more truthfully represented here by telling other stories, from avian migration and the evolution of ordnance to Jorge Luis Borges’s 1969 trip to Jerusalem and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls ... beautifully re-creates Rami and Bassam’s real-life relationship while offering a sweeping range of counterbalancing narratives, ultimately conveying the profound essentiality of their friendship. An important book; McCann’s considerable creative powers astound.
... tragic and transporting ... McCann meshes the actual and the imagined in concise, numbered passages totaling 1,001 in homage to the Arabian Nights. Each is exquisite and haunting, many are harrowing, and together they form an entrancing and unnerving associative collage of fact, memory, observation, and invention. He discovers startling connections while pondering weaponry and poetry, migrating birds and explorers, torture and checkpoints, the music of John Cage and Phillip Petit walking for peace on a tightrope over Jerusalem. McCann performs his own epic balancing act between life and art, writing with stunning lyricism and fluent empathy as he traces the ripple effects of violence and grief, beauty, and the miraculous power of friendship and love, valor and truth.
Rami and Bassam met through their shared participation in this bitter tradition, and from it came the friendship that inspired McCann to write this book. Around their life histories, the author fashions his apeirogon, a shape with a 'countably infinite number of sides.' The 'countable' part of it adds up to 1,001, perhaps fiction’s most auspicious number. In 1,001 sections, many as short as a single sentence, McCann ruminates on the fates of these families as a way of grasping the situation in Israel and Palestine — one that is often thought of as having only two sides ... Less like a traditional novel than a long braided essay, the novel traces a day in the lives of Rami and Bassam. It shares the dangers of their ordinary errands. It perseverates with them on their daughter’s deaths.
... a soaring, ambitious triumph ... a sprawling masterpiece but not a perfect one. Rarely does McCann incorporate the voices of women. Smadar and Abir are necessarily rendered silent by their deaths, but McCann doesn’t make much space, either, for Rami’s and Bassam’s wives to inhabit. Nor does he assemble women writers, artists, and intellectuals with anything approaching the frequency with which he defers to figures like Darwish and Borges. Still, his writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply nuanced and sensitive to the afflictions of both sides. As a whole, the book is a remarkable achievement ... Imperfect but ultimately triumphant, McCann’s latest novel might be his finest yet.
... masterful ... 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.
