Double tragedy leads to reflection in Middle East’s house of mirrors
Few authors explored the intersection of art and mathematics as rigorously as Jorge Luis Borges. He understood that, through mathematics, one could attempt to find order in randomness, yet order doesn’t always lead to comfort. As Colum McCann notes in “Apeirogon,” Borges knew that little effort is required to create terrifying complexity. In his 1977 lecture “Nightmares,” Borges wrote, “[I]t only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth.” He recounted in that lecture a nightmare in which he imagined a circular room with mirrored walls and windows, “so that whoever entered the room found himself at the center of a truly infinite labyrinth.”
“Two facing mirrors” is a good way to describe the structure of “Apeirogon,” Mr. McCann’s fictionalized portrait of two men, the Israeli Rami Elhanan and the Palestinian Bassam Aramin, whose daughters were killed 10 years apart in the continuing conflict of the Middle East.
Mr. McCann has divided this exceptional book into two halves of 500 sequentially numbered sections each, some as brief as a sentence and others as long as two pages. The numbers ascend in the first half and descend in the second. That effect creates a moving portrait of the emotions that govern the politics of the region and the tragedies that befell these men and their families.
Rami is a 67-year-old Israeli who became a graphic designer after returning from the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His dream was to enjoy a “spectacularly banal” life. And that’s what he had until 1997, when his 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, died after suicide bombers dressed as women blew themselves up outside an outdoor restaurant.
Bassam, the 48-year-old resident of the Palestinian town of Anata, spent seven years in prison for terrorist activities in Hebron. Long after his release, he suffered a tragedy similar to Rami’s when his 10year-old daughter, Abir, was hit in the back of the head by a rubber bullet. She had gone out to buy candy, including a candy bracelet Bassam kept in his pocket for two years after her death.
Rami and Bassam end up working together in Combatants for Peace, an organization Bassam cofounded, the goal of which was to bring Israeli and Palestinian soldiers together in the hope of finding common ground and putting an end to the violence.
An apeirogon, another mathematical concept Borges might have had fun with, is, as Mr. McCann notes, “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.” That’s what the author has created here in this nonlinear narrative: a dizzying assortment of perspectives on the tragedies and the region’s politics.
He brilliantly incorporates many literary techniques throughout, from sections written in the form of a play to the use of photos that calls to mind W.G. Sebald. He employs metaphors to great effect, most notably birds in the book’s first half and water in the second. Several real-life figures appear, including Philippe Petit, who figured prominently in Mr. McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin” and who appears here during his walk for peace across the Hinnom Valley in 1987. And Mr. McCann cites many writers, most prominently Borges but also authors such as Mahmoud Darwish and Jerzy Kosiński, whose quoted writings offer added dimension to the depicted events.
Toward the end of the novel, Mr. McCann writes that a “magnified view of a small piece” of an apeirogon “appears to be a straight line …. Anywhere is reachable. Anything is possible, even the seemingly impossible.” That is a perfect encapsulation of the message of this novel: To find comfort in the seemingly convoluted, start with a closer look.