The Mourning After – Leisure News
Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon follows the careers of two men, each grieving the loss of a child to the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From their anger, they converge toward a longing for peace.
The novel is structured in numbered sections. Some sections are just one sentence and some run over several pages. They go up to 500 and then come back down again, and if the reader at, say, 220 in the returning half goes back out of curiosity to 220 from the first half, that reader is often rewarded. The structure is reminiscent of the yin-yang diagram, but there is no black and white in McCann’s story. In its shades and nuances, that story reflects instead the figure with a countably infinite number of sides—an apeirogon.
Rami Elhanan is an Israeli whose 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a bomb. Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, is the father of 10-year-old Abir, who was killed by a rubber bullet idly fired by an Israeli soldier from the back of a jeep. They meet at the intersection of two circles. One is the Parents Circle, a group of people who have lost children in the conflict. The other is Combatants for Peace, made up of veterans and others who are opposed to the Occupation, seeing that it endangers both the occupied and the occupying nations.
Their search for reconciliation does not come from nowhere. Bassam is a student of the Holocaust, able to separate the people from their government, even in the face of daily humiliations of blockades, checkposts and interrogations. Rami and his family oppose their government’s policy of endless expansion. The grief of these men waters a seed that has been planted long before.
The novel reads like long-form journalism, with a scattering of photographs and documentary-style background about avian migratory routes over Israel and Palestine, the geometry of an extraordinary wooden pulpit, Molotov cocktails and Philippe Petit’s highwire walk across the Hinnom Valley with a pigeon in his pocket. McCann introduces elements that he takes up again and again, playing on our feelings. From the memories of the fathers, he resurrects not only the daughters but the multi-sided reality surrounding their absence.
Late in the novel, McCann refers to an experimental opera by Philip Glass that has the effect of “a sort of serenity surrounded by the feeling of being constantly disturbed”. The beauty and the sorrow of Apeirogon has exactly this effect.
