> THE READER
They’re hotly anticipated — so do these two new books live up to their pre-publication hype?
Apeirogon, Colum McCann, HarperCollins
An apeirogon is a multi-sided geometric structure, and so, too, is “Apeirogon,” the challenging new book by Colum McCann. He’s the Irish-American author of 2009’s “Let the Great World Spin,” which drew in part on Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between Manhattan’s Twin Towers and which won the U.S. National Book Award for Literature and the International Dublin Literary Award.
“Apeirogon” is another true story, about two men. Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian, a Muslim, whose 10-yearold daughter, Abir, was killed when a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli border guard crushed the bones in her head. She had just left a shop in East Jerusalem after buying a bracelet strung together with candies. Rami Elhanan is an Israeli, a Jew, whose daughter, Smadar, almost 14, was killed by suicide bombers. She had been out with her friends on the west side of Jerusalem buying schoolbooks.
Bassam and Rami met at the Parents Circle, a group whose membership includes families who have lost loved ones. Since then, the two fathers have been telling their story, at synagogues and mosques, to tourists and visitors, in film, in media accounts, to bring home the human toll of this intractable conflict.
“Apeirogon”’s geometry is revealed in 1,001 facets, some just a sentence, others several pages. It is creative non-fiction that honours the realities of the historical fact with, as McCann puts it, “invention at its core.” But it is about much more: The stealthy frigatebird, the model for Israeli engineers in creating their drones; the Dead Sea scrolls, at first hidden in clay pots, a burial place for sacred texts; the mushroom effect, whereby the head of a suicide bomber almost always separates from the torso; the pomegranate, whose Hebrew word, rimon, is also the word for grenade.
Sometimes the bombardment of information seems unrelated to the story. But keep reading, and you will find that everything is connected — and that is precisely the point.
Mr. Nobody, Catherine Steadman, Penguin
Catherine Steadman’s debut novel, “Something in the Water” was a Reese
Witherspoon book club pick and, by the by, among my favourite psychological thrillers of 2018, with a whiplash surprise at its heart. “Mr. Nobody,” her new suspenser, has an entirely different mouth feel but is just as satisfying.
It, too, has a watery element: A man wakes up on a Norfolk beach in southeast England, without memories, with no idea how he got there, knowing only that he must find a certain woman. That woman is soon revealed to be Dr. Emma Lewis, a London neuropsychiatrist with an expertise in amnesia. She is asked to examine the man the press calls Mr. Nobody to decide whether he is a fake or one of those rare cases of genuine fugue. She accepts the assignment reluctantly: Emma left her childhood home in Norfolk years ago after an event so traumatic that she and other family members changed their names and fled the area.
It’s a double puzzle, with Emma confronting her own past while helping her charismatic patient discover his. Great fun, told from shifting perspectives.
Sarah Sarah Murdoch Murdoch is a freelance contributor for the Star. Reach her at smurdoch49@gmail.com