We regard attempts to present a balanced perspective with natural and understandable suspicion. Many Jews, particularly Orthodox Jews, see the conflict through a sharp partisan and political lens, selectively keeping informed through books, newspapers, online outlets and conferences, that confirm their views rather than challenge them. Like McCann’s frigatebird that can stay aloft for up to two months, we are suspended above a traumatic situation, getting a view from what feels like infinite sides. The fragments are at times significant, at times pedestrian, just when the reader needs a little psychic relief. In a creative play of One Thousand and One Nights, a complex weave of ancient Persian tales, the book’s format veers from the traditional novel the story is told in 1,001 fragments, often a paragraph or a page long that discuss the migration patterns of certain birds, the humiliations of checkpoints, the composition of rubber bullets and the tragedy of burned Israeli buses, among many other themes. These are real people alive today, but McCann gives them a fictional context and embellishes the details of their respective stories. Both lost young daughters to the conflict and both belong to an organization called Combatants for Peace. The novel features two friends, an Israeli and a Palestinian, Rami and Bassam, tied by bonds of blood and loss. I heard about and then read Colum McCann’s brilliant new novel Apeirogon, and it became clear. This word never appeared on my SAT vocabulary lists. An apeirogon is a polygon of infinite sides.
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