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How Colum McCann Shaped Loss Into a Book

“Apeirogon,” the latest novel from the National Book Award winner, delves into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of two grieving fathers.

By Joumana Khatib

“I’m a bit of a magpie,” Colum McCann said, sheepishly gesturing around his office at Hunter College.

He has taught creative writing there for 13 years, and in that time has appointed his space with plenty of mementos: old family photographs, a self-portrait his daughter drew in neon crayon, a framed poster of what he said were among his friend Frank McCourt ’s last words to him. (“So, Frank, what will you confess?!!” McCann asked. “Pride springing from virtue. But not from virginity!”) But the keepsake he was looking for during an interview earlier this month, which he can’t believe he’s lost, is a napkin.

McCann remembers what it said: “Harness the power of your grief.” It was given to him by two fathers whose lives radically altered his own, and who became the central characters in his latest novel, “Apeirogon,” out next week from Random House.

The book is a fictionalized account of the men, one Israeli, one Palestinian, whose daughters were killed near Jerusalem 10 years apart. Rami Elhanan, who is Israeli, lost his teenager Smadar to a suicide bombing that occurred while she was shopping with friends in 1997. Abir, the 10-year-old daughter of Bassam Aramin, who is Palestinian, was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier in 2007. An apeirogon is a shape with an infinite but countable number of sides, and over the course of the book’s 1,001 chapters — a nod to “One Thousand and One Nights” — McCann delves into the two men’s lives, sometimes writing in their voices.

Aramin and Elhanan met in 2005 through Combatants for Peace , an organization that aims to end the occupation of Palestine, and they have become close friends. They are now involved in the Parents Circle - Families Forum , an organization for Israelis and Palestinians who have lost family members in the conflict.

McCann met the men in 2015, when he first visited the region with his storytelling nonprofit, Narrative 4 . He had been interested in Israel and Palestine’s history since talking with George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who helped broker peace negotiations in Ireland and the Middle East, and who appeared in McCann’s continent- and century-spanning 2013 novel “ TransAtlantic .”

“If anything dilates my nostrils, it’s the sense of some sort of difficulty,” McCann said. “I knew I was completely ignorant of what was going on there, and I thought I’d like to try and explore.”

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list . ]

He wound up spending a week in the region. “I was sort of priding myself on the fact of being able to deal with everything — I’ve seen Northern Ireland, I’ve done this before,” said McCann, who grew up in Dublin during the Troubles. He listened to Elhanan and Aramin speak in Beit Jala, a Palestinian town, and sobbed as they told their stories.

Lisa Consiglio, a co-founder of Narrative 4 who has known McCann for years, was also there. Hearing them, she said, was a “shock to our system that had already been shocked very much.” She had never seen McCann so visibly moved. “Subconsciously, I think I knew he had a book at that moment,” she said.

McCann left knowing he wanted to write about the conflict. He returned several times over the next four years to conduct research and interviews for “Apeirogon.”

The book has generated pre-publication interest: Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin Partners, bought the movie rights , and an Arabic version of the novel is in the works.

“Apeirogon,” like other books by McCann, interweaves real people with imagined conversations, scenes and other details of their lives. McCann’s National Book Award-winning novel, “ Let the Great World Spin ,” for example, uses the high-wire artist Philippe Petit as a launching point, while another of his novels, “ Dancer ,” imagines the life of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev .

But for McCann, the moral stakes of “Apeirogon” felt higher. “Nureyev can look after himself, and the memory of Nureyev can look after itself,” the writer said. “With Rami and Bassam, it’s so much closer to the edge, closer to the bone. If you get it wrong … they can’t necessarily recover in the same way that a really, truly, public figure could. Oh, I was terrified.”

In a moment when the publishing industry is grappling with which stories are told and by whom, it is a striking choice. “We’re in this territory of the real is the imagined and the imagined is real,” McCann said of this project. “I think people wouldn’t have trusted it as much if it wasn’t real.”

Elhanan’s and Aramin’s stories are well documented; their grief has entered public consciousness. They’ve been the subject of films, and have traveled the world talking about their loss and their conviction that “we can’t build a state on the ruins of our kids,” as Aramin said in an interview. Both have found salvation in the work, a way, Elhanan said, also in an interview, to “give meaning to my life and meaning to my loss.”

Neither man hesitated when McCann approached them about his idea. They trusted him as an artist, they said, recognizing that the book, even as a work of fiction, would amplify their message.

“In our first meeting, Colum was crying like a little kid,” Elhanan, 70, said. “His ability to show emotion shows that he’s a really fine man with heart — it’s the basic of all basics, the ability to show emotion and to show compassion.”

McCann’s background also helped, Aramin, 56, said, because many Palestinians often feel a sense of solidarity with the Irish. “We have the same history of conflict.”

“Apeirogon” can make for excruciating reading. McCann devotes sections to “the mushroom effect,” or how the heads of suicide bombers are nearly always separated from their torsos, and the damage that rubber bullets cause. Readers are in the ambulance with Aramin and his critically injured daughter, waiting two hours and 18 minutes for traffic to clear to reach another hospital. When Elhanan remembers the sound of the rollers in the morgue, readers can imagine it, too.

McCann’s fictionalization of such wrenching stories is likely to raise questions among readers, particularly in a story that unfolds in a charged political conflict where virtually every fact is up for debate. (One example: Israeli authorities initially suggested that Aramin’s daughter was killed by Palestinians throwing stones; an Israeli judge later ruled in civil court that she had been shot dead by an Israeli soldier.)

“It’s very difficult to talk about your pain or to read about your pain,” Aramin said. Both he and Elhanan have been reading it slowly.

Yet neither father asked McCann to change anything.

“I told him from the beginning, ‘It’s your book, not mine,’” Elhanan said. “It’s accurate, it’s emotional, but I don’t consider it to be my story.”

He knows that it may invite criticism, he added, “but the worst already happened. I have nothing to fear.”

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New Times, New Thinking.

Colum McCann’s Apeirogon: an ambitious work of “documentary fiction”

This novel based in fact spans the divide of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

By Johanna Thomas-Corr

The bird world’s second busiest superhighway charts a course over Israel’s West Bank. Every spring, 500 million birds representing 400 species migrate north from Africa to Europe. Every autumn they return the same way: nightjars and sparrows, owls and gulls, bee-eaters and flamingos, some birds forming “long vees of honking intent”, others riding as “sole travellers skimming low over the grass”, according to Colum McCann.

The sheer volume makes life extremely difficult for the Israeli Air Force. At times, the flocks are so numerous as to block out the sun. But what do the birds make of events on the ground? “Every year,” writes McCann, “a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, bypass roads”.

McCann, 54, is a Dublin-born novelist who resides in New York. He likes to situate himself in the borderless tradition of writers such as WG Sebald and Jorge Luis Borges and has identified with John Berger’s description of himself as a “patriot of elsewhere”. His own fiction is concerned with transcendence – rising above national borders, conflict, trauma and grief, as well as aesthetic boundaries – so it’s no surprise that birds and flight should feature so prominently. His 1998 novel, This Side of Brightness , opened with a man attempting to free a bird from the frozen Hudson. TransAtlantic (2013) examined migration between Ireland and America through the story of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic.

Birds form the central metaphor of McCann’s seventh novel, Apeirogon , a kaleidoscopic work that centres on the real-life stories of two fathers – one Israeli, one Palestinian – both grieving for daughters killed in one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Birds feature as witnesses and emissaries; as scientific models for the creation of drones and missiles; as symbols of political regimes; as the deadly enemies of aircraft; and as food for pampered leaders – specifically the former French president, François Mitterrand, whose last meal consisted of the rare and illegal thumb-sized delicacy of the ortolan songbird.

An apeirogon is a geometrical term for a shape with a near-infinite but countable number of sides and angles – an appropriate metaphor for a book that can indeed feel a little endless as it attempts to convey a singular message about love, redemption and healing.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

McCann presents his novel in 1,001 segments, counting up to 500 and back down again, with an extra fragment in the middle. Some are fiction, some are non-fiction, and they are interspersed with scientific facts, historical portraits, retellings of myths, and quotes from literature (perhaps unsurprisingly, given McCann’s structure, there are frequent references to One Thousand and One Nights ), as well as random information about everything from the history of water clocks to the workings of a human eye. There are even photographs embedded in the text, Sebald-style. McCann adds the provocative subtitle “a novel” because he wants us to question that claim. Apeirogon occupies the unsettled, disputed territory between fact and fiction.

Rami Elhanan is a veteran of the Israeli army whose 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing in 1997. She had been shopping for school books. Ten years later, Bassam Aramin’s ten-year-old daughter, Abir, was fatally wounded by a rubber bullet fired by Israeli border police. She was buying a bracelet of sweets. The men seem “the most unlikely of friends, even beyond of the obvious, one being Israeli, the other Palestinian”.

Bassam, who was born in a cave near Hebron from which his family were later evicted by Israeli forces, was imprisoned at 17 for planning an attack against Israel. In jail, he befriended a Jewish guard, took classes in Hebrew and eventually became convinced that the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust was “real – it had happened”. After seven years in prison and a 17-day hunger strike, Bassam married and had six children, later co-founding Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian movement of former fighters committed to non-violence.

The men first encountered each other through Rami’s son, a former Israeli soldier, at a group gathering. After the deaths of their daughters, they began meeting most days, eventually teaming up to become advocates for peace. Rami, a graphic designer, had spent most of his life casually looking down on Arabs, who “were there to fix our fridges on a Saturday”. But his wife, Nurit, is an outspoken critic of Israel and when Smadar was a baby she became a literal poster child for the peace movement. The slogan read: “What will life in Israel be like when Smadar reaches 15?” Smadar died two weeks away from her 14th birthday.

Some of the book’s most affecting moments are the brief glimmers of hope for peace. McCann revisits the real-life protagonist of his novel Let the Great World Spin (2009), which centred on Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk between New York’s Twin Towers in 1974. Here, he presents a beautifully controlled account of how the French acrobat walked 1,000 feet along a steel cable stretched between Jerusalem’s Arab and Jewish sectors, a stunt entitled “A Bridge for Peace”. Petit just about managed to release a dove midway through the walk, as the three-year-old Smadar watched from her father’s shoulders.

But the novel’s most electrifying moment arrives at its midpoint. We read speeches delivered by Bassam and Rami, pulled together directly from interviews. Their friendship has become their superpower. “They were so close that, after a while, Rami felt that they could finish each other’s stories… Word for word, pause for pause, breath for breath.”

One way of describing Apeirogon would be “documentary fiction”, a term that Sebald used for his novels. McCann also follows Sebald in his impassive tone: measured, solemn, sardonic when required. Borges is another idol. The Argentinian writer’s trip to Jerusalem is recounted in the book, as is his description of One Thousand and One Nights : “Time appeared inside time, inside yet another time.” Something to aim for, McCann must have thought.

The free-associative approach is also reminiscent of the cult documentary maker Adam Curtis, whose films find weird connections between seemingly unrelated moments in history. But McCann’s unpredictable leaps in both form and content often leave your brain feeling more exhausted than enlarged. At times, Apeirogon strains too hard for connections and patterns, which distract and detract from the story’s emotional core. McCann aims to hover over vast tracts of history, but often comes across as flighty instead. I’m not sure how much I needed to know about John Cage’s exploits in a reverberation-free “anechoic chamber” or how many gallons of water it takes to fill the average swimming pool.

These detours are all the more jarring given his apparent lack of interest in the novel’s female characters. The dead daughters are voiceless; the wives are passive, shadowy figures. Rami’s wife, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, – a former school mate of Binyamin Netanyahu – seems an interesting woman. The daughter of an Israeli general, she became a peace activist, a professor of Hebrew and a human rights campaigner. But McCann prefers lofty ruminations on male genius – Picasso, Gandhi, Rumi, Pascal.

Apeirogon could have been a lot more powerful had it been shorter and simpler; an octagon or heptagon, perhaps. But there is beauty and tenderness in McCann’s endeavour: Bassam and his wife refusing to paint over their dead daughter’s height markings until their other children grow past them; or Rami nervously queuing to use the telephone box after hearing of the suicide bomb that killed his daughter. It’s hard not to admire all that lovely noticing. He has entered into the lives of others and found poetry there. 

Apeirogon  Colum McCann Bloomsbury, 480pp, £18.99

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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2020 issue of the New Statesman, The age of pandemics

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Colum McCann’s ‘Apeirogon’ takes an elliptical approach to the unending Middle East conflict

The passionate and profligately gifted Irish maximalist Colum McCann, whose novel “ Let the Great World Spin ” won the 2009 National Book Award, likes to use nouns as verbs. In the first hundred pages of his new book, “ Apeirogon ,” he does it again and again: a biker “leans left and salmons his way” into traffic, satellite dishes “mushroom the roofs,” we see an ejected pilot “dreideling through the air” and birds “scissoring over the sea.”

The price of such language can be too high, drawing attention to itself in exchange for a fleeting judder of recognition. (It was Borges who said that only the oldest metaphors really count: “You compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming.”) Still, McCann excels at it, which makes it surprising when, as “Apeirogon” proceeds, his particular stylistic elan — this sleight of hand is only one example — first drops away, and then all but vanishes. The book’s subject is the unending conflict in the Middle East, and the author treats it with such careful ferocity that at times he nearly goes quiet. At last he truly does: One of the book’s hundreds of sections is simply a block of black ink, terrible and final. It seems to concede that there’s a place of pain where language ends.

And in this progression toward its own defeat, McCann’s book attains a strange nobility. “Apeirogon,” a loving, thoughtful, grueling novel, brushes up against those outer bounds.

It’s presented as a compilation of related fragments (a method with roots in romanticism, invigorated more recently by W.G. Sebald, Mary Robison and numerous others) but the organizing protagonists of “Apeirogon” are two figures from real life, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar and onetime political prisoner.

Each of the men has lost a daughter — in Rami’s case, Smadar, the victim of suicide bombers, in Bassam’s, Abir, killed by a rubber bullet fired from the back of an Israeli jeep by an 18-year-old. Improbably, the fathers become close friends, supporting each other’s protests and speaking across the world.

Yet this description doesn’t capture the experience of reading “Apeirogon.” (The word refers to an object with an uncountable number of sides — a little direct in its declaration of the book’s thesis, perhaps.) Its short, digestible sections are instead about candy bracelets, water clocks, the birds that fly above Jerusalem’s checkpoints, the taste of Coca-Cola in prison.

By now the benefits of this jittery style have come into focus: It allows an author to introduce various ideas and facts without the awkward carpentry that can make traditional novels about politics or history, in particular, seem strained. At the same time, its drawbacks are also plain, among them obscurity, lack of momentum and sententiousness.

McCann walks the line pretty well. (It’s hard to imagine anyone again achieving what Sebald did in “ The Rings of Saturn .” So be it.) Still, there are moments when he briefly returns to his natural gift for storytelling, and they’re the most powerful passages in the book. He shows us glimpses of Smadar, “her nose pierced, arm in arm with schoolgirl friends,” and Abir: “She liked bears and she liked the sea. She would hold a crayon in the corner of her mouth.”

One of the most durable chunks of creative wisdom handed down through time is that we use stories to make sense of the world. Maybe so. Certainly bad stories make sense of the world, McCann seems to imply: The just are rewarded, the unjust punished, love triumphs. The meek have a raw time of it, but they’re going to inherit the Earth.

To its occasional loss, “Apeirogon” resists the narrative model, opting instead for an open-ended approach, rhizomatic and searching. Of all contemporary subjects, Israel might be the one for which this choice is most justified, so intricate is its tragic history. Every section brings to mind Francis Bacon’s observation that if war is like the heat of exercise, civil war is like the heat of a fever. Can anything break it? The stories on either side have had their chance, McCann — an Irishman, after all — argues. Better now to trace the fallout of those tenaciously angry Israeli and Palestinian mythologies, to trace the genealogy of blame until we learn the lesson Rami and Bassam desperately hope to leave as their daughters’ legacy: “The only revenge is making peace.”

Charles Finch  is the author, most recently, of “The Last Passenger.”

By Colum McCann

Random House. 480 pp. $28

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