McCann is adept at transforming history into fiction in a way that brings the reader to view that history anew he is a writer who forges connections that would otherwise go unseen. This remarkable, complex novel demonstrates what has become a tenet of its author’s work: 'One story becoming another,' as he writes. Instead, it’s a masterpiece, a novel that will change the world, and you don’t hear that very often. It could have been maudlin, tawdry, exploitative, trite. I kept thinking as I read it about all the ways that Apeirogon could have failed, about the ammunition it might have provided to all of those who claim that no one should write a novel that reaches beyond their own particular experience. This, the novel suggests, is the solution to the conflict: something as simple and easy as friendship, as the acknowledgement of a shared experience, as love. The friendship of Bassam and Rami is a thing of great and sustaining beauty. For all its grief, Apeirogon is a novel that buoys the heart. You don’t read Apeirogon so much as feel it, as the particular tragedies of Bassam and Rami are lived out in an ever-present moment of loss. Is it absurd to suggest that a novel might succeed where generations of politicians have failed? Perhaps, but then Apeirogon is the kind of book that comes along only once in a generation.
But perhaps that’s the point – the desperation of the situation has brought forth a work of art whose beauty, intelligence and compassion may go some way to changing things. Now each side has retreated into belligerent isolation, with Donald Trump gleefully fanning the flames of discord. It feels as if the situation in the Middle East is always a reflection of its age. It’s a strange time for a novel as full-hearted as Apeirogon. It does far more than make an argument for peace it is, itself, an agent of change. But it’s indisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. it allows us to inhabit the interiority of human beings who are not ourselves. Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener. Reading Apeirogon we move beyond an understanding of Rami and Bassam’s grief from the outside we begin to share it. the novel succeeds brilliantly at its larger project. McCann’s brilliant act of novel-making builds a wholly believable and infinitely faceted reality around Rami’s and Bassam’s first-person accounts, a rich and comprehensive context that allows us into the fathers’ experiences, their histories, their minds. They’re also the most intimate pages of the book, and the most difficult to read. these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness. This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters.reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows.
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