Book Review: Apierogon by Colum McCann


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Recently I finished Apierogon by Colum McCann, a book I’ve had on my shelves and on my “To Read” list for upwards of four years. I initially bought it in 2020, shortly after the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Palestine in January. Initially, I didn’t start reading immediately because I was wary that it was going to be an “all sides” version of events, but I could not have been more wrong.

The title of the novel refers to a geometric shape that has an infinite number of sides and cannot be visualized by humans or computers. This is no doubt on purpose by the author to assure people we are not going to be asked to pick a side as you read the novel, but I think it’s a little pretentious to assume everyone picking this book up in the book store is going to know enough conceptual geometry to get that right off the bat.

The novel takes the tragic stories of Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan and the loss of their daughters to the conflict between Israel and Palestine and interweaves them with news reports, criminal and court records, legends, religious stories, and statistics. It’s a style of writing I’ve only ever encountered once before in Trieste by Dasa Drndic.

The thing that struck me the most throughout this novel is the friendship between Bassam and Rami. Rami’s daughter, Smadar, was killed in a suicide bombing on Ben Yehuda street in 1997 and Bassam’s daughter Abir was shot in the back of the head by an Israeli soldier on her way to school in 2007. I was also struck with the author’s ability to not compare the two tragedies, but instead was able to find the common ground of tragedy and understanding between the two men that the occupation of Palestine was the root of the issue and what caused them both to lose their children.

Rami and Bassam are real people, the parents group that they both participated in, and Combatants for Peace are real groups. The transcripts of their speeches from their speaking tours are also real, but the author was able to take creative license in the putting together of their stories. I have since watched this video where Colum McCann interviews Bassam and Rami.

I have also seen extremely valid criticism that this novel mischaracterizes the conflict as an equal fight between two equal sides and does not focus enough on the violence of the occupation of Palestine. I would agree more with this criticism if I had read this book in 2020, or when it was first published in 2020. However, I think three has been an extremely steep global learning curve in the last year about Palestinian existence and their occupation, and with that background knowledge, I think readers should be able to engage productively with this novel.

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