Apeirogon: A Novel

by Colum McCann

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers—one Palestinian, one Israeli, both connected by grief and working together for peace—from the National Book Award–winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin

“A quite extraordinary novel. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart.”—Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Independent • The New York Public Library • Library Journal
 
Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on to the schools their children attend to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.
 
But their lives, however circumscribed, are upended one after the other: first, Rami’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, becomes the victim of suicide bombers; a decade later, Bassam’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami and Bassam had been raised to hate one another. And yet, when they learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them. Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace—and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict.
 
This extraordinary novel is the fruit of a seed planted when the novelist Colum McCann met the real Bassam and Rami on a trip with the non-profit organization Narrative 4. McCann was moved by their willingness to share their stories with the world, by their hope that if they could see themselves in one another, perhaps others could too.
 
With their blessing, and unprecedented access to their families, lives, and personal recollections, McCann began to craft Apeirogon, which uses their real-life stories to begin another—one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. The result is an ambitious novel, crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers’ moving story at its heart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812981933
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	66,095
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Apeirogon, TransAtlantic, Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as three critically acclaimed story collections and the nonfiction books Letters to a Young Writer and American Mother. A regular contributor to The New York Times, he lives with his family in New York City. He is the cofounder of the global non-profit organization Narrative 4, which operates in 42 countries and uses storytelling to propel community action and change.

Read an Excerpt

2016

1

The hills of Jerusalem are a bath of fog. Rami moves by memory through a straight stretch, and calculates the camber of an upcoming turn.

Sixty-seven years old, he bends low on the motorbike, his jacket padded, his helmet clipped tight. It is a Japanese bike, 750 cc. An agile machine for a man his age.

Rami pushes the bike hard, even in bad weather.

He takes a sharp right at the gardens where the fog lifts to reveal dark. Corpus separatum. He downshifts and whips past a military tower. The sodium lights appear fuzzy in the morning. A small flock of birds momentarily darkens the orange.

At the bottom of the hill the road dips into another curve, obscured in fog. He taps down to second, lets out the clutch, catches the corner smoothly and moves back up to third. Road Number One stands above the ruins of Qalunya: all history piled here.

He throttles at the end of the ramp, takes the inner lane, passing signs for The Old City, for Giv’at Ram. The highway is a scattershot of morning headlights.

He leans left and salmons his way out into the faster lane, toward the tunnels, the Separation Barrier, the town of Beit Jala. Two answers for one swerve: Gilo on one side, Bethlehem on the other.

Geography here is everything.

2

THIS ROAD LEADS TO AREA “A”
UNDER THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY
THE ENTRANCE FOR ISRAELI
CITIZENS IS FORBIDDEN
DANGEROUS TO YOUR LIVES
AND IS AGAINST THE ISRAELI LAW

3

Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns.

It is the world’s second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels in the sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass.

Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, bypass roads.

Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast.

At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town.

Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremisan monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, travelling in their talkative lanes.

They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers.

4

The ancient sling was made of a cradle of cowskin, the size of an eye-patch, pierced with small holes and held together with leather thongs. The slings were designed by shepherds to help scare away predatory animals from their roving flocks.

The pouch was held in the shepherd’s left hand, the cords in his right. Considerable practice was needed to operate it with accuracy. After placing a stone in the pad, the slingman pulled the thongs taut. He swung it wide above his head several times until the moment of natural release. The pouch opened and the stone flew. Some shepherds could hit a target the size of a jackal’s eye from two hundred paces.

The sling soon made its way into the art of warfare: its capacity to fire up a steep slope and battlement walls made it critical in assaults on fortified cities. Legions of long-range slingmen were employed. They wore full body armor and rode chariots piled with stone. When the territory became impassible—moats, trenches, dry desert gulches, steep embankments, boulders strewn across the roads—they descended and went on foot, ornamental bags slung over their shoulders. The deepest held up to two hundred small stones.

In preparation for battle it was common to paint at least one of the stones. The talisman was placed at the bottom of the bag when the slingman went to war, in the hope he would never reach his final stone.

5

At the edges of battle, children—eight, nine, ten years old—were enlisted to shoot birds from the sky. They waited by wadis, hid in desert bushes, fired stones from fortified walls. They shot turtledoves, quail, songbirds.

Some of the birds were captured still living. They were gathered up and put into wooden cages with their eyes gouged out so that they would be fooled into thinking that it was a permanent nighttime: then they would gorge themselves on grain for days on end.

Fattened to twice their flying size, they were baked in clay ovens, served with bread, olives and spices.

6

Eight days before he died, after a spectacular orgy of food, François Mitterrand, the French president, ordered a final course of ortolan, a tiny yellow-throated songbird no bigger than his thumb. The delicacy represented to him the soul of France.

Mitterrand’s staff supervised the capture of the wild birds in a village in the south. The local police were paid off, the hunting was arranged, and the birds were captured, at sunrise, in special finely threaded nets along the edge of the forest. The ortolans were crated and driven in a darkened van to Mitterrand’s country house in Latche where he had spent his childhood summers. The sous-chef emerged and carried the cages indoors. The birds were fed for two weeks until they were plump enough to burst, then held by their feet over a vat of pure Armagnac, dipped headfirst and drowned alive.

The head chef then plucked them, salted them, peppered them, and cooked them for seven minutes in their own fat before placing them in a freshly heated white cassole.

When the dish was served, the wood-paneled room—with Mitterrand’s family, his wife, his children, his mistress, his friends—fell silent. He sat up in his chair, pushed aside the blankets from his knees, took a sip from a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Marbuzet.

—The only interesting thing is to live, said Mitterrand.

He shrouded his head with a white napkin to inhale the aroma of the birds and, as tradition dictated, to hide the act from the eyes of God. He picked up the songbirds and ate them whole: the succulent flesh, the fat, the bitter entrails, the wings, the tendons, the liver, the kidney, the warm heart, the feet, the tiny headbones crunching in his teeth.

It took him several minutes to finish, his face hidden all the time under the white serviette. His family could hear the sounds of the bones snapping.

Mitterrand dabbed the napkin at his mouth, pushed aside the earthenware cassole, lifted his head, smiled, bid good night and rose to go to bed.

He fasted for the next eight and a half days until he died.

7

In Israel, the birds are tracked by sophisticated radar set up along the migratory routes all over the country—Eilat, Jerusalem, Latrun—with links to military installations and to the air traffic control offices at Ben Gurion airport.

The Ben Gurion offices are high-tech, dark-windowed. Banks of computers, radios, phones. A team of experts, trained in aviation and mathematics, tracks the patterns of flight: the size of the flocks, their pathways, their shape, their velocity, their height, their projected behavior in weather patterns, their possible response to crosswinds, siroccos, storms. Operators create algorithms and send out emergency warnings to the controllers and to the commercial airlines.

Another hotline is dedicated to the Air Force. Starlings at 1,000 feet north of Gaza Harbor, 31.52583°N, 34.43056°E. Forty-two thousand sandhill cranes roughly 750 feet over southern edge of Red Sea, 20.2802°N, 38.5126°E. Unusual flock movement east of Akko, Coast Guard caution, storm pending. Projected flock, Canada geese, east of Ben Gurion at 0200 hours, exact coordinates TBD. Pair of pharaoh eagle-owls reported in trees near helicopter landing pad B, south Hebron, 31.3200°N, 35.0542°E.

The ornithologists are busiest in autumn and spring when the large migrations are in full flow: at times their screens look like Rorschach tests. They liaise with bird-watchers on the ground, although a good tracker can intuit the type of bird just by the shape of the flock on the radar and the height at which it is coming in.

In military school, fighter pilots are trained in the intricate patterns of bird migration so they can avoid tailspins in what they call the plague zones. Everything matters: a large puddle near the runway might attract a flock of starlings; an oil patch might slicken the wings of a bird of prey, disorienting it; a forest fire might throw a flock of geese far off course.

In migratory seasons the pilots try not to travel for extended periods at lower than three thousand feet.

8

A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade.

Editorial Reviews

Brilliant . . . powerful and prismatic . . . Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener. . . . It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it’s undisputably 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.”—The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
 
“This is a wondrous book. In an accretion of splendid detail, McCann writes with an amazing abundance of humanity as he describes the age-old story of inhumanity to man. The effect is absolutely staggering—it will bring you to your knees. Writing at the top of his game, McCann brings us a book that we sorely need. It left me hopeful; this is its gift. What a read!”—Elizabeth Strout
 
“Virtuosic . . . Colum McCann’s grand and exhilarating novel Apeirogon is . . . a profound prayer for peace. . . . Apeirogon reminds us that such incandescent art evokes humility and light in the face of oppression and loss.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Dazzling . . . hypnotic . . . heartbreaking and mesmerizing . . . Besides the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the narrative, this is also a deeply human story.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“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.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
“Distinguished by empathy and intelligence, this transformative novel marks a new threshold of writing about the conflict. Apeirogon will have a potent effect on all those who read it and, remarkably, could lead to great consequences for the future of this place.”—Raja Shehadeh, author of Palestinian Walks  
 
“A work of incredible magnitude . . . McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope.”—Assaf Gavron, author of The Hilltop 
 
“A soaring, ambitious triumph . . . deeply nuanced and sensitive . . . a remarkable achievement . . . McCann’s latest novel might be his finest yet.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

A work of incredible magnitude. McCann finds the emotional accuracy, the sensitivity, and the beauty to tell the heartbreaking reality of life in Israel-Palestine, while allowing readers a glimmer of necessary hope. It is greater than a novel in more than one sense, and will both touch and enrich readers, wherever they live and whatever they know about the region.

author of The Hilltop Assaf Gavron

"Gorgeous prose; a sweeping look at the paradoxical relationship between history and private life; a penetrating examination of the deficiencies and marvels of the human spirit. . . .Apeirogon is visceral and devastating, yes; but it is also propulsive, muscular, swerving through details of life—real and imagined—with urgency, borne along on prose that is some of McCann’s finest, fully displaying his powers as a storyteller of just about supernatural ability. This book will break your heart and make you rethink how storytelling works."

Tea Obreht

Colum McCann loves a high-wire act, and Apeirogon is a powerful, political tightrope walk of a novel. It’s the story of modern Israel and the story of modern Palestine. This beautiful, deeply felt book is first and foremost an extraordinary act of listening.

Nathan Englander

The latest novel from the National Book Award winner blends fiction with history to examine how two men channel their grief into political power as they become advocates for peace in the Middle East

Time magazine

In the spirit of Picasso's Guernica, Apeirogon reminds us that such incandescent art evokes humility and light in the face of oppression and loss” 

O magazine

Brilliant ... powerful and prismatic ... Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener ... It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it's undisputably 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

New York Times Book Review

"Eloquent and erudite, Apeirogon reinvents and reimagines some incidents and conversations, but it is at its core a true story. And because it is true, it is at times both unbelievable and unbearable to read. . . . It is near impossible to read those speeches without weeping, and it is equally impossible to read them without being inspired to hope.” 

Winnipeg Free Press

A jagged, fractured, teeming novel … Apeirogon is a daring structural feat, a conspicuously elaborate and multivalent piece of novelistic engineering … The distilled and fractured form has a glistening poetry” 

Times Literary Supplement (London)

Thirteen Ways of Looking wonderfully showcases [McCann’s] fierce intellect and capacious, empathetic imagination.” 

The Globe and Mail

A loving, thoughtful, grueling novel” 

Washington Post

Weaves documentary and imagination into its tough physical fabric ... Frequently beautiful … Often dazzles … At the core of this fractal fiction is a simple, radiant myth: "The hero makes a friend of his enemy"” 

The Economist

A quite extraordinary novel. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart.

Kamila Shamsie

Keep reading, and you will find that everything is connected — and that is precisely the point.

Toronto Star

  “[TransAtlantic] is quite simply one of the best, most sustained pieces of fiction I’ve read in some time… [It] remains a novel of true resonance and power.” 

The Independent (UK)

Distinguished by empathy and intelligence, this transformative novel marks a new threshold of writing about the conflict. Colum McCann manages to take it all in without prejudice and with profound feeling for the suffering of all sides. Apeirogon will have a potent effect on all those who read it and, remarkably, could lead to great consequences for the future of this place.

Raja Shehadeh

An apeirogon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides – and Colum McCann's transcendent book is full of hundreds of thought-provoking, emotional segments … McCann turns these haunting true stories into engrossing fiction, and he does so with poetic power” 

independent.co.uk

"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."

Booklist (starred review)

McCann makes his prose dance across the surface of this ingeniously constructed novel [Let the Great World Spin]… He is a fearless writer.” 

The Telegraph (UK)

Colum McCann is drawn to lives lived, and his vivid, reactive and heartfelt fiction lives and breathes, sighs and weeps.” 

The Irish Times on Transatlantic

Every significant novel is an act of reckless originality. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is nothing like any book you’ve ever read. Think of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, or George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo for the first time. Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it’s capable of containing, has been expanded, forever.

Michael Cunningham

This is a wondrous book. In an accretion of splendid detail, McCann writes with an amazing abundance of humanity as he describes the age-old story of inhumanity to man. The effect is absolutely staggering, it will bring you to your knees. Writing at the top of his game, McCann brings us a book that we sorely need. It left me hopeful; this is its gift. What a read — !

Elizabeth Strout

"Apeirogon is a novel of profound empathy with the struggle of ordinary people in conflict. Without moral judgement McCann writes of ruthless oppression and it’s  opposition. . . . The mirror he holds up is a stark  truthful one and we will see ourselves reflected if we care to look. . . .This is a stunningly well written book. Courageous and necessary, truthful and ultimately hopeful, this may be Colum McCann’s masterpiece."

Gabriel Byrne

Now you have to read Apeirogon ... Delirious and thrilling, spectacular

Sunday Times (London)

"This may be McCann’s magnum opus."

Chatelaine

What a marvel of a book! Wise, complex and timely. A magnificent achievement” 

Graham Norton

A profound account of pain and healing …The closest recent comparisons – in terms of ambition and intention, if not style – might be Claudia Rankine's genre defying works on race such as Citizen: An American Lyric or Maggie Nelson's exploration in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder of the murder of her aunt, books that transcend the usual categories and set out to challenge and amaze” 

The Guardian

A loving, thoughtful, grueling novel” 

Washington Post

Colum McCann is drawn to lives lived, and his vivid, reactive and heartfelt fiction lives and breathes, sighs and weeps.” 

null The Irish Times on Transatlantic

National Book Award-winning and bestselling author McCann narrates this blending of the fact and fiction of a Palestinian and an Israeli father who both lost children to the Middle East conflict. McCann melds the emotional pain and common tragedy creating the unlikely real-life friendship of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, who, along with McCann, have pledged to tell the story of the physical and emotional wreckage of the war. McCann adds flawless pacing and a poignant edge to the account of two men who were raised to hate each other but end up together on a mission. McCann tells this complex and heartbreaking story with compassion and empathy for people strafed by the worst thing that can happen to a parent, the loss of a child. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

★ 2019-10-28
An ambitious novel about an Israeli, a Palestinian, and the grief they share in common.

Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin both lose their daughters when the girls are still young. Rami's Smadar dies in an explosion caused by suicide bombers; Bassam's Abir is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami is Israeli, Bassam Palestinian. They both become advocates for peace in the Middle East. McCann's (Thirteen Ways of Looking, 2015, etc.) latest novel is a soaring, ambitious triumph: It tells the stories of Rami and Bassam, both based on real people, and their daughters and their land and much else, besides. The novel is splintered into short, numbered segments that count up to 500 before crawling back down to 1. The effect is kaleidoscopic. McCann wheels outward in a widening circuit, not unlike the birds that form a central metaphor that recurs throughout the book. Some segments describe Israeli-Palestinian politics; others are composed of photographs; still others are made up entirely of quotes from figures as disparate as Picasso and Mahmoud Darwish. The result is 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.

Kirkus Reviews