Apeirogon

The title of Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (Random House) comes from the geometric term for “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.” A pretty good way of describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to be sure.

But this novel is about so much more than that. It’s about Rami and Bassam, two real-life fathers divided by just about everything, but united in the worst of ways: they both buried a daughter. It’s also about migratory birds and slingshots and drones and rubber bullets and suicide bombings and checkpoints and dehumanization and grief and, yes, absolutely, hope.

In the middle of the book, we find ourselves at the Cremisan monastery on a hillside near Bethlehem:

“. . . on an ordinary day at the end of October, foggy, tinged with cold, to listen to the stories of Bassam and Rami, and to find within their stories another story, a song of songs, discovering themselves—you and me—in the stone-tiled chapel where we sit for hours, eager, hopeless, buoyed, confused, cynical, complicit, silent, our memories imploding, our synapses skipping, in the gathering dark, remembering, while listening, all of those stories that are yet to be told.”