By placing them at the center of the book, and by setting them off formally, McCann indicates their primary importance in the novel. The text of Chapters 500 and 500 comes directly from the source material in the note that precedes the novel, McCann tells us they’re “pulled together from a series of interviews in Jerusalem, New York, Jericho and Beit Jala.” Indeed, you can find bits of those chapters online in articles from The New York Times and The Guardian these fathers’ grief-stricken voices are already part of the public consciousness. Those chapters are bookended by two pages starkly illustrated with small photos of what might be desert or ocean: the visual equivalent of a moment of silence. Both Chapter 500s consist of the fathers’ first-person accounts of their losses and their paths toward activism. They’re numbered from 1 to 500 and then back from 500 to 1, with Chapter 1,001, the ending, located at the direct center of the book. The chapters that capture their experience - and convey so much else about life in the Holy Land - move freely through time and space. Since 2007 they’ve traveled all over the world together, speaking about what they experienced and why they believe that a peaceful end to the occupation is not only possible, but necessary. By the time Abir was shot, Elhanan and Aramin were close friends. Aramin co-founded the activist group Combatants for Peace Elhanan joined up after his son Elik brought him to a meeting, some seven years before Abir’s death. Its primary subject is the fraternal relationship between the girls’ fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. This novel, divided into 1,001 fragmentary chapters - a number alluding to “The Thousand and One Arabian Nights” - reflects the infinite complications that underlie the girls’ deaths, and the unending grief that follows.

An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite yet countable number of sides. These real-life events form the seed of “Apeirogon,” Colum McCann’s powerful and prismatic new novel.

Her ambulance was delayed for hours at a border checkpoint, and she died two days later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the same hospital where Smadar was born. The local Palestinian clinic where Abir was treated had little working equipment, so doctors decided to transfer her to a better-equipped hospital on the other side of the wall. A decade later, and less than three miles away, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, wearing her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she’d just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier as his jeep sped around a corner. 4, 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan - dressed in a Blondie T-shirt, her hair cut short, her Walkman playing Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U” - was walking down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others.

Apeirogon review