The two main subjects of the book are Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. The historian in me gets a little nervous when McCann says that his is a “hybrid novel with invention at its core, which like all storytelling, weaves together elements of speculation, memory, fact, and imagination” but then again I get uneasy whenever I read a book without footnotes. The dialogue between them is not a verbatim transcription but generally accurate. The book describes in great – and true – detail the intersecting trajectories of two men and their daughters. McCann, an award-winning novelist, calls Apeirogon a novel, but it is an example of the non-fiction novel, a genre that has become quite popular in recent years, using a novelist’s technique to tell a real story. The best fiction, journalism, and works of history go beyond generalizations to explore the contradiction-fraught lives of real people and, as well as any book I’ve read in recent years, Apeirogon does just that, with a page-turning narrative filled with heart-breaking detail. The favorite graffito of Bassam Aramin, one of the two main characters in this book, is something he once saw on the Separation Barrier, “end the preoccupation.” The current status quo is inherently rickety and unstable, unloved by all and detested by many, but it lingers on, well into its second-half century, impervious to any effort by the right or the left, by Jewish Israelis or Palestinians, to change it. We endlessly ask “what is to be done,” but we know that for any suggestion of a way forward, it is far easier to make the case for its probable failure than its possible success. Believers in two Israeli and Palestinian states believe that one state is impossible.

Believers in one Israeli-Palestinian state believe that two states are impossible. I am sympathetic to Beinart’s arguments, but let me summarize the reactions. We have all been reading assorted takes on Peter Beinart’s essay “Yavne” in recent weeks. It is a place of constricted and narrowed geographies and of intellectual claustrophobia as well where the political options impinge and jostle one another, like cars vainly trying to pass one another on one of those tight roads in Palestinian communities only one car-width wide a world where familiarity has bred a contemptuous and sometimes murderous understanding of “the other.”įor outsiders, it is easy to reduce the situation to abstractions. A sense of claustrophobia pervades McCann’s novel. (BTW, an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite number of countable sides.) The “here” is the Jerusalem and West Bank of the present and recent past, of the First and Second Intifadas, of Netanyahu’s unending reign of misrule, and of quagmires new and old. The phrase recurs throughout McCann’s remarkable, compulsively readable new novel. “Geography here is everything,” writes Colum McCann on the first page of Apeirogon.

Apeirogon review