Colum McCann's Apeirogon

"The only revenge is making peace," Bassam Aramin's son tells an audience of seven hundred people at the Alternative Memorial Service for Palestinian and Israeli citizens. Araab Aramin is speaking for the first time, taking up the mantle his father has shouldered since his daughter Abir was shot in the back of the head by an Israeli soldier as she walked to school. In a minute the listeners will hear from Yigal, son of Rami Elhanan, whose daughter Smadar died at the hands of a Palestinian suicide bomber.


These men and their sons are actual people. They have been traveling the world for years, telling their stories to any who will listen as members of The Parents Circle Family Forum https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/pcff-home-page-en/, a non-profit that no one wants to belong to as it means you've lost a loved one in the Israeli-Palestinian debacle. The National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann has written a truly remarkable novel based upon the friendship of Rami and Bassam and the tragedies that brought them together.


Unlike anything I've read this year, "Apeirogon" had me at page one and I hated to put it down. This exquisite book defies genre as McCann folds into the

narrative of Rami, Bassam. Abir and Smadar, a history of the Occupation, the PLO, the rise of Netanyahu, the Holocaust, and the development of military weaponry. He even gives readers a lesson on falconry that spans centuries.


But the most important thing that McCann accomplishes is bringing Abir and Smadar to full, glorious life. Through their parents' eyes, their teachers' reports, their siblings' memories, readers visualize who these young women could have been had they been allowed to live to their full potential. They are symbolic of thousands of youth in the Middle East who have died in service to generations of prejudice, misunderstanding, and zealotry in a land that has room for all of them if they could only concentrate on their commonalities rather than their differences.


For decades politicians have promised solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. They have all failed and sadly will continue to. Why? Because, like the blazing racial/economic crisis in the United States, politicians have caused these problems. McCann shows us through fiction that it's the everyday people, the victims, the idealists, the children, who hold the future in their hands. "Apeirogon" should have been the most difficult book I've read this year but instead it left me lighter and more uplifted than I've felt in a long time. This will definitely be on my top ten list for 2020.