While I was writing it, I had no idea if it would work or not. I was flying blind and the book is a map of your head as much as it is a map of mine. You travel it, I travel it, we both slog on the cartography.
“Spare me. But allow me to contradict myself. “I don’t like writers complaining about the difficulty of writing,” he says. Heartbreakingly, the story always comes back to the young girls’ deaths. It’s a fragmentary collage that goes off on seemingly endless tangents, and McCann admits that he had to work out of an inner recklessness to find this “compendium of human experience”. It’s not a typical narrative the deaths of children Smadar and Amir are painfully, painstakingly picked apart but interspersed with Bassam and Rami’s own lives in Palestine and Israel, with sections on bird life, Philippe Petit’s famous high-wire walk across the Hinnom Valley in 1987, even falconry in the UAE.Īpeirogon by Colum McCann. McCann likens the novel to conducting an orchestra, which makes a lot of sense. What other conflict is as divisive as this one? How can a writer get in under the nature of all this and capture the mad vagaries of what's going on? I wanted to tell a story that anyone who knew nothing about the conflict could understand, but at the same time write it for people who absolutely understood the nuts and bolts. So it was an all-embracing form." I was completely taken by it. And I was terrified at the prospect of taking it on. I mean, terrified. "Everything about their story intrigued me. "When I came upon the story of Rami and Bassam, I had to admit that I was confused by the politics of Israel and Palestine," McCann remembers. United by grief after their young daughters were killed (Rami's murdered by a suicide bomber and Bassam's shot dead by Israeli forces), they find some solace from these tragedies in each other. But its very title alone – apeirogon is a mathematical term for a shape with an infinite number of sides – that challenges us to think about the nuance of the conflict, its contradictions, its ironies and its pain.Īt its heart are two real-life men – a Palestinian, Bassam Aramin, and an Israeli, Rami Elhanan.
He knows that people have entrenched ideas about the settings and people he celebrates, mourns, depicts and ponders. We – and let me say, mea culpa – often go into places we shouldn't go and we condescend. We patronise. We steal. Cultural appropriation is a very real thing.
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