Apeirogon

Colum McCann took on a near impossible task here: Apeirogon is at least oral history, contemporary fiction, social history, protest, politics, polemic and philosophy. It is written in 1,001 short pieces, in homage to the Arabian Nights' 1,001 stories, which is also referenced throughout. The central story is that of two real-life people that McCann spent a long time with in Israel and Palestine: Bassam and Rami, best friends from the two places who both lost daughters and became members of the pacifist group 'Combatants for Peace'.

While this is their story, beautifully told, it also weaves and winds in moments of international politics and social theory. Some are broadly fictionalised, some historical accounts, some documentation.

An apeirogon is a shape with countably infinite sides, a perfect symbol of an unfathomably complex story. I cried several times at the heartbreaking loss of both fathers, and what their inner peace cost them. I learned more than I expected in a work of fiction. And although there are flawed moments in such an ambitious project, they do not spoil the wonder that this book is.

This is a transcendental novel.

It expands over the regular, over nuance, and over time. It also bends fiction and nonfiction to weave several arcs into one, not that it makes this book difficult or complicated.

The book focuses on the friendship between an Israeli man and a Palestinian man, their respective deaths in the families, and of how life works for most people; I'm being fuzzy, but the book—as well as human life—is; this book throws more nuance into the picture than most do, which is quite a feat, considering that this is all about human beings in Palestine and Israel.

This book engrossed and changed me. It's that big.

There are no other words that I can use to review the book other than say it's very human and beautifully pieced together; the book consists of 1,001 chapters. It's a marvellous and daring feat to write a book in this way, but consider how human thought is mostly led up different twists and turns. We're all kinetic in thought and act and this book reflects this. It also provides solace, meditation, thinking, while providing ethics, morals, thoughts, invasion, hatred, war, anger, forgiveness, and, foremost, understanding.

Understanding for each other. This is also why the book serves a very important purpose. It goes beyond where many books even are predestined to go.

A rubber bullet, when shot from a metal tube on the end of an M-16, leaves the barrel of the gun at more than one hundred miles per hour. The bullets are large enough to be seen but too fast to be avoided. They were tested first in Northern Ireland, where the British called them knee-knockers: they were designed to be fired at the ground, then bounce up and hit the legs of rioters.

The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.

The room had two large sofas, a long table and eight red chairs. Nobody took the sofas at first. They sat at opposite ends of the table. The language that they might use for each other was already fraught: Muslim, Arab, Christian, Jew, soldier, terrorist, fighter, martyr, occupier, occupied.

An hour slid by. The Israelis leaned into the table. One of them had, he said, been a pilot. Another, a paratrooper. One had spent much of his service as a commander at the Qalandia checkpoint. They had been in the forces, yes, but they had begun to speak out: against the Occupation, humiliation, murder, torture. Bassam sat stunned. He had never heard an Israeli mention such words before. He was certain they were on an operation. Intelligence, surveillance, an undercover ploy. What confused him was that one of them, Yehuda, looked like a settler. Stout and spectacled, with a long beard. Even his hair wore the mark of a kippah. Yehuda had been an officer in Hebron. He had, he said, begun to rethink it all, the conscription, the operations, all the talk of a moral army. Bassam leaned back in his chair and scowled. Why would they send such a glaring ruse? What kind of mockery was this? Perhaps, he thought, it was a form of double-think, triple-think: the Israelis were known for it, their mesmerizing chess, their theater, intricate and ruthless.

There are two to three seconds of consciousness after decapitation when the brain is still functioning: the mouth can make a sound and there can be ocular movement, a twitching of the eyeball or the opening—or closing—of an eyelid. It is said that decapitated men often look surprised as their bodies separate from their heads: as if their final thoughts are in flight, visions of loved ones in Stockholm, in Savannah, in Sierra Leone, in so many small and scattered Samarias.

Once, during Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, the Indian novelist received a single pebble in the mail, alone in a white envelope with no note included. The pebble sat on his desk for years until a New York house-cleaner mistakenly swept it up and threw it away.

The Kabbalists, in their attempt to examine the nature of the divine, are known to envision two aspects of God. The first, known as Ein Sof, finds God to be transcendent, unknowable, impersonal, endless and infinite. The second aspect is accessible to human perception, revealing the divine in the material world, available in our finite lives. Far from contradicting each other, the two aspects of the divine— one locatable, one infinite—are said to be perfectly complementary to one another, a form of deep truth to be found in apparent opposites.

Borges, too, was fascinated by the Kabbalah. He suggested that the world might merely be a system of symbols and that the universe, including the stars, was a manifestation of God’s secret handwriting.

Borges wrote that it only takes two facing mirrors to form a labyrinth.

As a teenager, Bassam learned to carry an onion in his pocket to combat the scorch of tear gas in his lungs.

The Czech composer and pianist Rafael Schächter was held at the camp in Theresienstadt where he managed to smuggle in a legless upright piano. It was kept, at first, in a basement. Schächter conducted a chorus of Jewish musicians in sixteen performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. The musicians learned the intricate music from a single vocal score. Schächter was interested in keeping the camp morale high. The performances were attended by senior Nazis and guards who, at the end, gave standing ovations. The final performance came during Operation Embellishment when excerpts of the Requiem were played for the Danish government officials and the Red Cross, after which Schächter was loaded in a railroad cattle car and shipped off to Auschwitz where he, like the filmmaker Kurt Gerron, heard the pellets dropping down through the grates in the ceiling.

After Schächter’s final performance, Eichmann is reported to have said: Those crazy Jews, singing their own requiem.

And you know, you just know, deep in your heart, by the way the nurses look at you, by the way the policemen shake their heads, by their hesitance, by the silences, you know, but you won’t admit it. You do this for many long hours until eventually, very late at night, you and your wife find yourselves in the morgue.

This is a transcendental novel.

It expands over the regular, over nuance, and over time. It also bends fiction and nonfiction to weave several arcs into one, not that it makes this book difficult or complicated.

The book focuses on the friendship between an Israeli man and a Palestinian man, their respective deaths in the families, and of how life works for most people; I'm being fuzzy, but the book—as well as human life—is; this book throws more nuance into the picture than most do, which is quite a feat, considering that this is all about human beings in Palestine and Israel.

This book engrossed and changed me. It's that big.

There are no other words that I can use to review the book other than say it's very human and beautifully pieced together; the book consists of 1,001 chapters. It's a marvellous and daring feat to write a book in this way, but consider how human thought is mostly led up different twists and turns. We're all kinetic in thought and act and this book reflects this. It also provides solace, meditation, thinking, while providing ethics, morals, thoughts, invasion, hatred, war, anger, forgiveness, and, foremost, understanding.

Understanding for each other. This is also why the book serves a very important purpose. It goes beyond where many books even are predestined to go.

A rubber bullet, when shot from a metal tube on the end of an M-16, leaves the barrel of the gun at more than one hundred miles per hour. The bullets are large enough to be seen but too fast to be avoided. They were tested first in Northern Ireland, where the British called them knee-knockers: they were designed to be fired at the ground, then bounce up and hit the legs of rioters.

The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.

The room had two large sofas, a long table and eight red chairs. Nobody took the sofas at first. They sat at opposite ends of the table. The language that they might use for each other was already fraught: Muslim, Arab, Christian, Jew, soldier, terrorist, fighter, martyr, occupier, occupied.

An hour slid by. The Israelis leaned into the table. One of them had, he said, been a pilot. Another, a paratrooper. One had spent much of his service as a commander at the Qalandia checkpoint. They had been in the forces, yes, but they had begun to speak out: against the Occupation, humiliation, murder, torture. Bassam sat stunned. He had never heard an Israeli mention such words before. He was certain they were on an operation. Intelligence, surveillance, an undercover ploy. What confused him was that one of them, Yehuda, looked like a settler. Stout and spectacled, with a long beard. Even his hair wore the mark of a kippah. Yehuda had been an officer in Hebron. He had, he said, begun to rethink it all, the conscription, the operations, all the talk of a moral army. Bassam leaned back in his chair and scowled. Why would they send such a glaring ruse? What kind of mockery was this? Perhaps, he thought, it was a form of double-think, triple-think: the Israelis were known for it, their mesmerizing chess, their theater, intricate and ruthless.

There are two to three seconds of consciousness after decapitation when the brain is still functioning: the mouth can make a sound and there can be ocular movement, a twitching of the eyeball or the opening—or closing—of an eyelid. It is said that decapitated men often look surprised as their bodies separate from their heads: as if their final thoughts are in flight, visions of loved ones in Stockholm, in Savannah, in Sierra Leone, in so many small and scattered Samarias.

Once, during Salman Rushdie’s fatwa, the Indian novelist received a single pebble in the mail, alone in a white envelope with no note included. The pebble sat on his desk for years until a New York house-cleaner mistakenly swept it up and threw it away.

The Kabbalists, in their attempt to examine the nature of the divine, are known to envision two aspects of God. The first, known as Ein Sof, finds God to be transcendent, unknowable, impersonal, endless and infinite. The second aspect is accessible to human perception, revealing the divine in the material world, available in our finite lives. Far from contradicting each other, the two aspects of the divine— one locatable, one infinite—are said to be perfectly complementary to one another, a form of deep truth to be found in apparent opposites.

Borges, too, was fascinated by the Kabbalah. He suggested that the world might merely be a system of symbols and that the universe, including the stars, was a manifestation of God’s secret handwriting.

Borges wrote that it only takes two facing mirrors to form a labyrinth.

As a teenager, Bassam learned to carry an onion in his pocket to combat the scorch of tear gas in his lungs.

The Czech composer and pianist Rafael Schächter was held at the camp in Theresienstadt where he managed to smuggle in a legless upright piano. It was kept, at first, in a basement. Schächter conducted a chorus of Jewish musicians in sixteen performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. The musicians learned the intricate music from a single vocal score. Schächter was interested in keeping the camp morale high. The performances were attended by senior Nazis and guards who, at the end, gave standing ovations. The final performance came during Operation Embellishment when excerpts of the Requiem were played for the Danish government officials and the Red Cross, after which Schächter was loaded in a railroad cattle car and shipped off to Auschwitz where he, like the filmmaker Kurt Gerron, heard the pellets dropping down through the grates in the ceiling.

After Schächter’s final performance, Eichmann is reported to have said: Those crazy Jews, singing their own requiem.

And you know, you just know, deep in your heart, by the way the nurses look at you, by the way the policemen shake their heads, by their hesitance, by the silences, you know, but you won’t admit it. You do this for many long hours until eventually, very late at night, you and your wife find yourselves in the morgue.