Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Oakdale Library | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION MCC | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "A quite extraordinary novel. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart."--Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire
FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD * LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE * WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Independent * The New York Public Library * Library Journal
From the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers.
Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on to the schools their children attend to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.
But their lives, however circumscribed, are upended one after the other: first, Rami's thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, becomes the victim of suicide bombers; a decade later, Bassam's ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami and Bassam had been raised to hate one another. And yet, when they learn of each other's stories, they recognize the loss that connects them. Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace--and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict.
This extraordinary novel is the fruit of a seed planted when the novelist Colum McCann met the real Bassam and Rami on a trip with the non-profit organization Narrative 4. McCann was moved by their willingness to share their stories with the world, by their hope that if they could see themselves in one another, perhaps others could too.
With their blessing, and unprecedented access to their families, lives, and personal recollections, McCann began to craft Apeirogon, which uses their real-life stories to begin another--one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. The result is an ambitious novel, crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers' moving story at its heart.
Author Notes
Irish writer Colum McCann was born near Dublin in 1965 and graduated from the University of Texas with a B.A. degree. He has worked as a newspaper journalist in Ireland and written several short stories and bestselling novels. The short film of Everything in this Country Must was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.
McCann's work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Irish Times, La Repubblica, Die Zeit, Paris Match, the Guardian, and the Independent. He has won numerous awards, such as a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. In 2009 McCann was inducted into the Irish arts association Aosdana. He teaches in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at New York's Hunter College.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
National Book Award--winner McCann (Let the Great World Spin) bases this masterful novel on the lives of two real men working together toward Middle Eastern peace. Rami Elhanan, 67 on the single day of 2016 on which the main narrative takes place, is a graphic designer and Israeli military veteran. In September 1997, his 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing. His need for revenge fades when he joins the Parents' Circle, whose members, of many nationalities and religions, have all lost a child in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nineteen years younger than Elhanan, Palestinian Bassam Aramin is jailed in 1985, at 17, for resisting the Israeli occupiers in Hebron, where he's raised. During his imprisonment, writings by Gandhi, among others, and friendship with one of the Israeli guards convince him of the power of nonviolence. Released after seven years, he helps found Combatants for Peace, which brings Palestinian and Israeli fighters--among them Elhanan's son, who introduces the two men--together for dialogue. The fatal 2005 shooting of Bassam's 10-year-old daughter, Abir, by an Israeli border guard doesn't shake his belief that Israelis and Palestinians share "an equity of pain"; he and Elhanan begin meeting daily, using their daughters' stories to become international advocates for peace. The book's title is a reference to a polygon with a countable but infinite number of sides, and McCann evokes the experience of its protagonists and their region through 1,001 brief numbered segments that incorporate sequences in the men's own voices and interconnect topics including bullet manufacturing, Jorge Luis Borges, and birds. Balancing its dazzling intellectual breadth with moments of searing intimacy, this is a transformative vision of a historic conflict and a triumph of the novelist's art. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Colum McCann's odd and ambitious book contains almost 500 pages of fact and fiction about the Israel Palestine conflict, combined with various quotations, asides, remarks, insights, musings and statements of fact on all manner of subjects, including the working habits of Picasso, the invention and manufacture of rubber bullets, the work of senator George Mitchell during the Northern Ireland peace talks and the correspondence between Einstein and Freud. Accompanied by a few photographs and images, the text is arranged in 1001 numbered sections, numbered 1-500, plus a bridging section, numbered 1001, and then sections numbered 500-1. This vast and curious arrangement of parts is clearly intended to recall the One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade's famous telling of Middle Eastern folktales in order to ward off death. Apeirogon is named, we learn, "for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides", which is certainly a good title for a book that eludes easy categorisation (and for one that explores the furiously intractable Israel-Palestine conflict). It is a hybrid work, neither exactly fact nor fiction. The closest recent comparisons - in terms of ambition and intention, if not style - might be Claudia Rankine's genre-defying works on race, such as Citizen: An American Lyric, or Maggie Nelson's exploration in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder of the murder of her aunt, books that transcend the usual categories and set out to challenge and amaze. "An Israeli, against the occupation. A Palestinian, studying the Holocaust." At the centre of Apeirogon are the transcripts of interviews conducted by McCann with two men - Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli - whose lives were brought together by grief. In 1997 Elhanan's 13 year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber. In 2007 Aramin's 10-year-old daughter Abir was shot by an Israeli soldier. The two men met through the charity the Parents Circle Family Forum and have since made it their life's work to travel the world together, speaking about their experiences of loss, pain and healing. "I don't have time for hate any more," McCann quotes Aramin. "We need to learn how to use our pain." Around these two profound and plain-speaking nonfiction centrepieces, McCann recounts and imagines aspects of the men's stories, the girls' experiences, and multiple other tales. These are little micro-narratives, sometimes only a sentence long, sometimes stretching across several pages and referring back and forth throughout the book. They muse on life in Israel and under the occupation, and on Borges, Theresienstadt, Philippe Petit, Christ's crucifixion, bird migrations. (Birds function as a symbol throughout the book: symbols of freedom, providers of alternative perspectives.) Sometimes the entries seem trivial. Section No 360, for example, reads, in its entirety: "End the Preoccupation." And the endless lists, as lists can do, pall. Wi tness No 385: "The Separation Wall. Also known as the Separation Barrier. Also known as the Separation Fence. Also known as ¿ " etc. But at other times the relentlessness seems entirely necessary, and the brevity is to the point. No 126: "Albert Einstein wrote to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel - known also as the Stern Gang - to say that, after the massacre in Deir Yassin, he would no longer be willing to assist them with aid or help raise money for their cause." The book offers few if any of the usual satisfactions of the novel. But as a compendium of facts, a homage, a kind of creative response to the brave, sad work of Aramin and Elhanan, it is both insightful and moving. The amassing of all the incidental detail is what really adds up: we learn that when she was killed, Smadar was wearing a Blondie T-shirt and listening to Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2U" on her Walkman, while Abir had just bought a candy bracelet. "I began to think," says Aramin, "that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all: what can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others?" You can honour the story - the stories, rather. Which is exactly what McCann has done.
Kirkus Review
An ambitious novel about an Israeli, a Palestinian, and the grief they share in common.Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin both lose their daughters when the girls are still young. Rami's Smadar dies in an explosion caused by suicide bombers; Bassam's Abir is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami is Israeli, Bassam Palestinian. They both become advocates for peace in the Middle East. McCann's (Thirteen Ways of Looking, 2015, etc.) latest novel is a soaring, ambitious triumph: It tells the stories of Rami and Bassam, both based on real people, and their daughters and their land and much else, besides. The novel is splintered into short, numbered segments that count up to 500 before crawling back down to 1. The effect is kaleidoscopic. McCann wheels outward in a widening circuit, not unlike the birds that form a central metaphor that recurs throughout the book. Some segments describe Israeli-Palestinian politics; others are composed of photographs; still others are made up entirely of quotes from figures as disparate as Picasso and Mahmoud Darwish. The result is a sprawling masterpiece but not a perfect one. Rarely does McCann incorporate the voices of women. Smadar and Abir are necessarily rendered silent by their deaths, but McCann doesn't make much space, either, for Rami's and Bassam's wives to inhabit. Nor does he assemble women writers, artists, and intellectuals with anything approaching the frequency with which he defers to figures like Darwish and Borges. Still, his writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply nuanced and sensitive to the afflictions of both sides. As a whole, the book is a remarkable achievement.Imperfect but ultimately triumphant, McCann's latest novel might be his finest yet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Bassam and Rami have a seemingly impossible relationship. A Palestinian and an Israeli, respectively, they are connected by the historical conflict between their nations as well as by tragedy, for they have both lost children to political violence. Their losses are, like the infinitely faceted polygon of the title, almost unimaginable and so unspeakable. But together, Rami and Bassam travel the world to speak about the deaths of their daughters and their shared hope for a different world. The tale of these friends in mourning resists simple storytelling expectations such as beginnings and endings and is more truthfully represented here by telling other stories, from avian migration and the evolution of ordnance to Jorge Luis Borges's 1969 trip to Jerusalem and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. VERDICT Organized into 1,001 sections, this novel from McCann (Let the Great World Spin) beautifully re-creates Rami and Bassam's real-life relationship while offering a sweeping range of counterbalancing narratives, ultimately conveying the profound essentiality of their friendship. An important book; McCann's considerable creative powers astound. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/19.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Excerpts
Excerpts
2016 1 The hills of Jerusalem are a bath of fog. Rami moves by memory through a straight stretch, and calculates the camber of an upcoming turn. Sixty-seven years old, he bends low on the motorbike, his jacket padded, his helmet clipped tight. It is a Japanese bike, 750 cc. An agile machine for a man his age. Rami pushes the bike hard, even in bad weather. He takes a sharp right at the gardens where the fog lifts to reveal dark. Corpus separatum. He downshifts and whips past a military tower. The sodium lights appear fuzzy in the morning. A small flock of birds momentarily darkens the orange. At the bottom of the hill the road dips into another curve, obscured in fog. He taps down to second, lets out the clutch, catches the corner smoothly and moves back up to third. Road Number One stands above the ruins of Qalunya: all history piled here. He throttles at the end of the ramp, takes the inner lane, passing signs for The Old City , for Giv'at Ram . The highway is a scattershot of morning headlights. He leans left and salmons his way out into the faster lane, toward the tunnels, the Separation Barrier, the town of Beit Jala. Two answers for one swerve: Gilo on one side, Bethlehem on the other. Geography here is everything. 2 THIS ROAD LEADS TO AREA "A" UNDER THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY THE ENTRANCE FOR ISRAELI CITIZENS IS FORBIDDEN DANGEROUS TO YOUR LIVES AND IS AGAINST THE ISRAELI LAW 3 Five hundred million birds arc the sky over the hills of Beit Jala every year. They move by ancient ancestry: hoopoes, thrushes, flycatchers, warblers, cuckoos, starlings, shrikes, ruffs, northern wheatears, plovers, sunbirds, swifts, sparrows, nightjars, owls, gulls, hawks, eagles, kites, cranes, buzzards, sandpipers, pelicans, flamingos, storks, pied bushchats, griffon vultures, European rollers, Arabian babblers, bee-eaters, turtledoves, whitethroats, yellow wagtails, blackcaps, red-throated pipits, little bitterns. It is the world's second busiest migratory superhighway: at least four hundred different species of birds torrent through, riding different levels in the sky. Long vees of honking intent. Sole travelers skimming low over the grass. Every year a new landscape appears underneath: Israeli settlements, Palestinian apartment blocks, rooftop gardens, barracks, barriers, bypass roads. Some of the birds migrate at night to avoid predators, flying in their sidereal patterns, elliptic with speed, devouring their own muscles and intestines in flight. Others travel during the day to take advantage of the thermals rising from below, the warm wind lifting their wings so they can coast. At times whole flocks block out the sun and daub shadows across Beit Jala: the fields, the steep terraces, the olive groves on the outskirts of town. Lie down in the vineyard in the Cremisan monastery at any time of day and you can see the birds overhead, travelling in their talkative lanes. They land on trees, telegraph poles, electricity cables, water towers, even the rim of the Wall, where they are a sometime target for the young stone throwers. 4 The ancient sling was made of a cradle of cowskin, the size of an eye-patch, pierced with small holes and held together with leather thongs. The slings were designed by shepherds to help scare away predatory animals from their roving flocks. The pouch was held in the shepherd's left hand, the cords in his right. Considerable practice was needed to operate it with accuracy. After placing a stone in the pad, the slingman pulled the thongs taut. He swung it wide above his head several times until the moment of natural release. The pouch opened and the stone flew. Some shepherds could hit a target the size of a jackal's eye from two hundred paces. The sling soon made its way into the art of warfare: its capacity to fire up a steep slope and battlement walls made it critical in assaults on fortified cities. Legions of long-range slingmen were employed. They wore full body armor and rode chariots piled with stone. When the territory became impassible--moats, trenches, dry desert gulches, steep embankments, boulders strewn across the roads--they descended and went on foot, ornamental bags slung over their shoulders. The deepest held up to two hundred small stones. In preparation for battle it was common to paint at least one of the stones. The talisman was placed at the bottom of the bag when the slingman went to war, in the hope he would never reach his final stone. 5 At the edges of battle, children--eight, nine, ten years old--were enlisted to shoot birds from the sky. They waited by wadis, hid in desert bushes, fired stones from fortified walls. They shot turtledoves, quail, songbirds. Some of the birds were captured still living. They were gathered up and put into wooden cages with their eyes gouged out so that they would be fooled into thinking that it was a permanent nighttime: then they would gorge themselves on grain for days on end. Fattened to twice their flying size, they were baked in clay ovens, served with bread, olives and spices. 6 Eight days before he died, after a spectacular orgy of food, François Mitterrand, the French president, ordered a final course of ortolan, a tiny yellow-throated songbird no bigger than his thumb. The delicacy represented to him the soul of France. Mitterrand's staff supervised the capture of the wild birds in a village in the south. The local police were paid off, the hunting was arranged, and the birds were captured, at sunrise, in special finely threaded nets along the edge of the forest. The ortolans were crated and driven in a darkened van to Mitterrand's country house in Latche where he had spent his childhood summers. The sous-chef emerged and carried the cages indoors. The birds were fed for two weeks until they were plump enough to burst, then held by their feet over a vat of pure Armagnac, dipped headfirst and drowned alive. The head chef then plucked them, salted them, peppered them, and cooked them for seven minutes in their own fat before placing them in a freshly heated white cassole. When the dish was served, the wood-paneled room--with Mitterrand's family, his wife, his children, his mistress, his friends--fell silent. He sat up in his chair, pushed aside the blankets from his knees, took a sip from a bottle of vintage Château Haut-Marbuzet. --The only interesting thing is to live, said Mitterrand. He shrouded his head with a white napkin to inhale the aroma of the birds and, as tradition dictated, to hide the act from the eyes of God. He picked up the songbirds and ate them whole: the succulent flesh, the fat, the bitter entrails, the wings, the tendons, the liver, the kidney, the warm heart, the feet, the tiny headbones crunching in his teeth. It took him several minutes to finish, his face hidden all the time under the white serviette. His family could hear the sounds of the bones snapping. Mitterrand dabbed the napkin at his mouth, pushed aside the earthenware cassole, lifted his head, smiled, bid good night and rose to go to bed. He fasted for the next eight and a half days until he died. 7 In Israel, the birds are tracked by sophisticated radar set up along the migratory routes all over the country--Eilat, Jerusalem, Latrun--with links to military installations and to the air traffic control offices at Ben Gurion airport. The Ben Gurion offices are high-tech, dark-windowed. Banks of computers, radios, phones. A team of experts, trained in aviation and mathematics, tracks the patterns of flight: the size of the flocks, their pathways, their shape, their velocity, their height, their projected behavior in weather patterns, their possible response to crosswinds, siroccos, storms. Operators create algorithms and send out emergency warnings to the controllers and to the commercial airlines. Another hotline is dedicated to the Air Force. Starlings at 1,000 feet north of Gaza Harbor, 31.52583°N, 34.43056°E. Forty-two thousand sandhill cranes roughly 750 feet over southern edge of Red Sea, 20.2802°N, 38.5126°E. Unusual flock movement east of Akko, Coast Guard caution, storm pending. Projected flock, Canada geese, east of Ben Gurion at 0200 hours, exact coordinates TBD. Pair of pharaoh eagle-owls reported in trees near helicopter landing pad B, south Hebron, 31.3200°N, 35.0542°E. The ornithologists are busiest in autumn and spring when the large migrations are in full flow: at times their screens look like Rorschach tests. They liaise with bird-watchers on the ground, although a good tracker can intuit the type of bird just by the shape of the flock on the radar and the height at which it is coming in. In military school, fighter pilots are trained in the intricate patterns of bird migration so they can avoid tailspins in what they call the plague zones. Everything matters: a large puddle near the runway might attract a flock of starlings; an oil patch might slicken the wings of a bird of prey, disorienting it; a forest fire might throw a flock of geese far off course. In migratory seasons the pilots try not to travel for extended periods at lower than three thousand feet. 8 A swan can be as fatal to the pilot as a rocket-propelled grenade. Excerpted from Apeirogon: a Novel by Colum McCann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.