If you’ve followed my reviews recently, you will have noticed that one of my pet peeves is the current fashion for novels to be constructed from a collection of disparate paragraphs, often separated by asterisks, where you are left as reader to impose your own structure of the disjointed narrative. On that basis, I should have hated this book, but I didn’t. Instead, I was deeply moved by it.
To be honest, I don’t even know how to pronounce the title, which refers to a geometrical term for “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides”, a definition which confuses me because I don’t know how something can be countable and infinite. This paradox is explored further:
As a whole, an apeirogon approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line. One can finally arrive at any point within the whole. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible. At the same time, one can arrive anywhere within an apeirogon and the entirety of the shape is complicit in the journey, even that which has not yet been imagined. (p. 437)
Paradox lies at the heart of this book, which is based on the real-life experience of two men, Jewish Rami Elhanan and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, both of whom lost their daughters to the violence in the West Bank. Rami’s 14 year old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing, while Bassam’s daughter, 10 year old Abir, was shot in the back of the head by a rubber bullet after buying a candy bracelet at a store near her school. Together, and almost against their own wishes, they become spokesmen for Parents Circle, a group for bereaved parents, both Jewish and Muslim, who have lost their children to the violence. The two fathers travel the world together on speaking tours to small groups, schools (e.g. Bialik College in Melbourne in May 2023) or at literary/cultural events (e.g. the Wheeler Centre during the same tour- YouTube recording available here). Jewish Rami Elhanan is a peace activist; Palestinian Muslim Bassam undertakes academic research on the Holocaust. Even McCann’s strong proclamation by the very title of the book that it is ‘A Novel’ is a paradox, as the characters and events are all real, and the structure of the book is not novelistic as such.
Instead, it is 1001 small chapters- in fact, I don’t know if ‘chapter’ is the right word for them, as some are small black and white photos; others only one or two sentences in length. As such, it references the 1001 Arabian Nights. The first 499 lead up to a hiatus in the book where in chapter 500 Rami Elhanan tells his story in an extended narrative, followed by No 1001 which is a single page summary of the one-day action of the two men appearing at a presentation at a monastery in the mainly Christian town of Beit Jala near Bethlehem 2016. The countdown then goes in reverse, with chapter 500 being Bassam’s story in an equally extended narrative, then moving backwards towards a return to a darkness that echoes the opening chapter 1 at the start of the book.
Despite its kaleidescopic, fractured appearance, the book is actually very carefully structured. The deaths of the two daughters run throughout the 1001 chapters, but there are other motifs as well: birds, salt, numbers, silence and music. At times the chapters seem to be arranged in a form of clang-association. There is nothing random here.
This book was written in 2000, and I found myself wondering how this partnership would hold up after October 7 2023 with the Hamas attack on Israel in Gaza, and the following disproportionate retaliation. It seems, incredibly, that it has. But the book also illustrates the tragically inevitable attack of October 7 when Bassam’s anguished ambulance journey with his dying daughter whose transfer to a better-equipped hospital was obstructed, with an almost mocking nonchalance, by Israeli security forces. Rami’s life, while brought undone by grief, continues along well-oiled, prosperous lines; Bassam’s life, equally brought undone by grief, is constrained by petty and arbitrary humiliations. If this book is out-dated, it is also a lesson in inevitability and consequences.
This is a beautifully written, erudite, emotionally cutting book. I’m surprised that it didn’t make the short-list for the Booker Prize in 2020 after being long-listed. Too political? I thought it was excellent, and unfortunately just as important today as it was six years ago.
My rating: 10/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.
