Fifty Books Project 2023

 

Apeirogon by Colum McCann

 

A bony structure at the bottom of the trachea – the syrinx – is integral to the voice box of birds.  With its surrounding air sac, the syrinx resonates to sound waves created by membranes along which the bird forces air.  The pitch of the song is created when the bird shifts the tension on the membranes.  The volume is controlled by the force of the exhalation.

 

The bird can control two sides of the trachea independently so that some species can produce two distinct notes at once.

 

 

 

A hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, Apeirogon is a wonderful example of form and content working to reinforce each other.  An apeirogon is a geometrical shape of infinite, countable sides.  McCann uses this idea – of infinite points of view – and the model of the Arabian classic, One Thousand and One Nights to explore the stories of Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew, each of whom has lost a child to the conflict over the Occupied territories.

 

Bassam and Rami are real – they are members of Combatants for Peace, an organization made up of people who have fought on either side of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and now call for an end to hostilities on both sides.  They are also members of The Parents Circle, an organization for families that have lost children to the violence of the conflict.  Most importantly, they are close friends who work together to stop the conflict.  

 

In 1997, Rami’s daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber on a crowded street in downtown Jerusalem while coming home from school.  Ten years later, Bassam’s daughter, Abir, was killed by a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier while she was coming out of a candy store.  McCann narrates their stories repeatedly, moving back and forth through time, focusing now on the incidents themselves, now on Bassam’s grief, now on Rami’s decision to attend the Parents Circle, returning always to the way the two men have turned their grief and anger into non-violent advocacy for peace, travelling around Israel and Europe telling their stories, usually together, one after the other.  Bassam takes up studying the Holocaust, Rami travels through the occupied territories clandestinely to attend meetings in areas that as an Israeli are closed to him.

 

The story is structured in 1001 very short chapters – sometimes only a sentence long, rarely more than a page or two.  Blended with these fragments of narrative are other non-fiction segments.  Early on, we get several chapters focused on the migratory birds that travel across Israel in their journey from Africa to Europe.  Birds become a metaphor – their tenacity, their frailty, their songs – come to enhance our feel for the work of Bassam and Rami.  The metaphor feels as real as the rest of the text – it is not that McCann is doing much to build their figurative associations, it is more that he points out that birds are metaphors.  There are similar motifs regarding horses, the Dead Sea, the early exploration of the Dead Sea.  There are chapters devoted to music, with John Cage getting special attention.  The construction, burning and reconstruction of the minibar of Saladin gets explained in several chapters.

 

While these details may seem obtuse or intellectual, they do not read that way.  The book manages to be a page turner, with the unfolding tale of Smadar and Abir, Bassam and Rami giving emotional heft to what is a subtle and detailed examination of Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine.  The book may be too long – perhaps 1001 chapters is more than we needed to get the point.  The arc is so loose that one could almost pick up anywhere and read the chapters in random order.  However, I am not sure this is criticism – I suspect someone who picked through the book and read a few chapters from different sections would be compelled to return.  A thousand and one may be too many of these little bits of narrative, but I read them all and went back and read some of them again.

 

I am not sure I have ever spent even a few minutes thinking of or talking about the conflict between Israel and Palestine without focusing on who is right and who is wrong, assigning blame, predicting victory or defeat.  Apeirogon gave me hours of focus on that tragedy as tragedy, with an eye to the notion that attempting to find blame is, perhaps, what is at fault.