Colum McCann cracks open the rib cage of Palestinian-Israeli violence in his excruciating novel “Apeirogon.”
Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction, the Irish American author is the opening speaker for the three-day Santa Fe International Literary Festival beginning Friday, May 19. The event features authors Jennifer Egan (“A Visit from the Goon Squad”), Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), John Irving (“The Cider House Rules”), Diana Gabaldon (“Outlander”), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (“Chain Gang All-Stars”), Denise Chávez (“The King and Queen of Comezón”), Ingrid Rojas Contreras (“The Man Who Could Move Clouds”) and more.
Born and raised in Dublin, McCann is the author of seven novels, including “Let the Great World Spin,” “TransAtlantic,” “Zoli” and “Dancer,” as well as three story collections and two works of nonfiction. His work has been published in 40 languages.
In 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan,wearing a Blondie T-shirt and listening to Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” on her Walkman, was walking down a Jerusalem street when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others. A decade later, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, donned in her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she had just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier.
This pair of tragedies provides the nucleus of McCann’s “Apeirogon.” An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite yet countable number of sides.
McCann fractured his book into 1,001 chapters, echoing the storytelling of Scheherazade in “One Thousand and One Nights.” The structure reflects the infinite complications underlying the girls’ deaths and the resulting unending grief. The author focuses on the relationship between their fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew.
McCann met the pair when he was visiting the Middle East with his nonprofit story exchange group Narrative 4.
McCann climbed a staircase into an Israeli office building on a rainy November afternoon in 2015.
“In one of the offices sat two men,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. “They proceeded to tell their stories.
“My breath was taken away by the depth of their stories,” he continued. “I cried my eyes out. They wrote on a napkin, ‘Harness the power of your grief.’ I still have it.”
Unable to shake the experience, when McCann returned home he asked the men if he could write their stories.
“Bassam and Rami were telling these stories to keep (their daughters) alive,” he said,
The author travelled to the Middle East researching his book a dozen times, straddling the back of Rami’s motorcycle and staying at the homes of the men.
“I tried to get to know the region,” he said. “It struck me that maybe I was the right one to tell it because I didn’t know the politics.
“We’re still the best of friends.”
The link between McCann’s background and his decision to focus on personal and political divisions may stem from his childhood.
McCann grew up in Dublin in the shadow of the Troubles. His mother was from Derry. He remembers riding the bus north with her to visit the family’s farm.
“You go up on a bus and the soldiers would come on at the border,” he said. “Sometimes they would pull people off. My mum would always tell me to be quiet.
“I was always interested in the dynamics of a country at war with itself.
“I knew what a checkpoint was about,” he added. “I knew what it was like to come to a divided place.”
“Apeirogon” churns with a constellation of details; the ballistics of rubber bullets and the names of 36 species of migratory birds traversing an ancient and perilous flight path across Israel annually. McCann excavates the designs of slingshots boys have used for thousands of years to bring them down.
Bassam habitually slung stones. The shooter who killed Abir thought he was under attack by protesters throwing stones.
“It’s part of the second busiest migratory place in the world,” McCann said. “All of these birds fly over Israel and Palestine. In a way, it was the journey for all of us. They have no idea that they’re landing in Israel. They have no idea they’re landing in Palestine.”
Rami and Bassam confronted their grief by working with the activist group Combatants for Peace. Their losses made them brothers. They tell their stories across the globe.
Steven Speilberg’s Amblin Entertainment bought the movie rights to “Apeirogon.”
