Apeirogon

a book review by Connie Kent

A horrible book. Horrible and horrifying. It’s shocking, distressing, confusing, sad. And it’s true.

This disturbing tale is presented as a novel set in contemporary times. An Israeli man and a Palestinian man each lost a daughter to violence. The Palestinian man’s ten-year-old daughter was hit in the back of the head with a rubber bullet (a metal bullet with a rubber coating) as she stood outside a candy store with her friends during a morning break from school. The shooter was an eighteen year old Israeli soldier. Ten years earlier, the thirteen year old daughter of the Israeli was one of several victims of a Palestinian suicide bomber. Eventually, the men became friends participating in an organization that presents lectures worldwide, educating the rest of us and urging peace.

It’s a long book. It has 1001 chapters. Some are as short as one sentence, others cover several pages. Chapter numbers reach a peak in the middle and then reverse back to chapter one in the second half.

‘Apeirogon’ means “a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.” How can that be? It comes up several times in the book. It may refer to the infinite number of sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with people of many different nations having a share; it may refer to the fact that, if you follow the line around the figure, you always come back to the starting point. That was explained somewhere in the book. It’s an unhappy story, a horrifying book – not a happy read. But it’s an important one.

McCann, Colum. Apeirogon. Random House, 2020.