Dear Reader: I wrote this originally for the participants in my writing classes and in the 19 Ways but as I wrote it, I realized it was also written for you.
A great book appears. It is a rare occurrence. We can’t predict it. It isn’t a yearly event. It might not happen in a decade or even longer. When it does, one knows one is the recipient of a singular gift that humans can give to each other.
Such is Apeirogon. An Apeirogon is a polygon that cannot be constructed and has a countably infinite number of sides and has a countably infinite number of angles. Such is the book. Infinite in its sides and angles.
But it is more than that. It is the exact, complex, wildly intelligent, rigorous and relentless telling of the horrific war of Israel upon the Palestinian people and its particular and global history, from its Biblical beginnings and earlier and wider and how such events affect not only humans but more than humans, even birds, and how we came to such a moment, we, you and I, as did each of the real people whose real stories, unbearable stories, true stories are the focus of this telling. One story and another story. One agony and another agony. And the Israelis and Palestinians as people, peoples and members of the human species. What is our nature? Can we heal?
And it is more than that. The writing is unbearably and unimaginably beautiful. And here is the mystery, it is because of the beauty that we finally understand the wound and its depth and enormity, and the extent of what we don’t know. Because of the beauty, we can bear witness to what is monstrous. Because of the beauty we will not look away from what is entirely unendurable.
Finally, McCann, the Irish author living in the US, creates a new form which is needed for such content. There are 1000 chapters. Or 2000. Which is difficult to discern. Some may only be a word, three words, or a sentence or a paragraph. There is a space, a breath then each time the writer names a chapter’s number. This allows us to integrate what we have heard.
The interconnecting chapters have great range — in addition to the core retelling of the lives, events and experiences of Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, an Israeli against the Holocaust, and Bessam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Palestinian studying the Holocaust, two members of Combatants for Peace who each lost a daughter to the war and become dear friends, whose sons become friends. Alongside the telling of their stories, are associations of an expedition to the Dead Sea, to pursuits of Richard Burton, the explorer, to amicable numbers 280 and 220, to the story of why the bomb, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki which was not the original intention, to the Holocaust, the Shoah, the Nakba and the Intifadas, then to the music and silences of John Cage, an excerpt from a letter from Einstein to Freud and more and more as the polygonic nature of reality is revealed, including what made my heart drop, a reference to my dear friend Anaïs Nin listening to a lecture by Antonin Artaud in Paris, who, afterwards, was in despair because the audience had not understood his theatrical teachings about death. It was when she appeared to me like a ghost while I was listening to McCann, though she died in 1977 just as I learned I had breast cancer, that I could no longer fail to understand that everything is related to everything else. And so everything is one.
Yes, that’s it, but no, that’s not it quite. It is that we are called to see the connections and live accordingly. And live accordingly as Rami and Bessam do.
After the chapters on the twelfth century construction of the Minbar of Saladin, considered a jewel of Islamic art, its great beauty, its architectural and mathematical perfection, its destruction by fire in 1969 after standing for 800 years without a single nail or any glue holding it together, and its perfect reconstruction by 2007, it begins to appear that the poetic literary form that McCann has constructed is intended, also, to resemble music and “music is liquid architecture,” as Goethe said, “and architecture is frozen music.”
Apeirogon is a must read, or must listen to this remarkable reading by McCann, not only because it is a great literary work — long listed for the Booker prize 2020, winner of the National Jewish Book award, finalist for the Dublin Literary Award and in my mind, deserving a Nobel even if (but not) only for this book — but because our lives, work and writing demand we finally know what we must know so that we can, as peoples, live, and if so, live among each other in relationship which is the natural way.
I invite you also to read James Janko’s just published The Wire-Walker, a story of another young Palestinian girl, a wire-walker who learns her skills in the Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus. The two books speak to each other, including but not at all limited to the many could be shared experiences in Nablus — (as could be said, also of my novel, What Dinah Thought which brought Janko and me together, written at the time of the first Intifada and republished in December 2024) — but also the moment when French high-wire artist Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between Jerusalem’s Arab and Jewish sectors to release a dove for peace in 1987. Perhaps Janko and I will speak also of Apeirogon when we speak on Zoom about the parallels — and so adding to the literary apeirogon — between The Wire-Walker and The Story That Must Not Be Told, tba. When I wrote to Janko about Apeirogon, he said he had read it twice but hadn’t listened to it and that he would.
I hope you will as well.
************************************************************************************** For my writing classes and 19 Ways, please read or listen to Colum McCann reading Apeirogon to consider together the week of February 18 – 21 which, as appropriate to the book, is also Ramadan and Ash Wednesday!
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The Story That Must Not Be Told, my latest Novella, is now available on Bookshop, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon. Or, ask your favorite bookseller to carry copies in your local bookstore.
