We’re evicted from the narrative on almost every page so that McCann can tweezer in arty and only vaguely relevant facts about birds, or about John Cage’s music, or about the Dead Sea Scrolls or the derivation of the word “dextrose.” They want for their grandchildren what the narrator of the Israeli writer David Grossman’s exquisite novel “See Under: Love” wanted, “to live in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.” You sense you would like Rami and Bassam if you got to know them.īut we are not allowed to settle into the texture and nuance of their experience. Rami and Bassam no longer want to silo their suffering. From multiple angles, we witness the events that led to their daughters being killed. In others, we flash back to earlier points in their lives. They attend meetings, give lectures, worry about crossing border checkpoints. In many of McCann’s 1,001 shards, we follow Rami and Bassam in something like real time. The Time magazine film critic Stephanie Zacharek, writing on Twitter, recently called “storytelling” a “jazz-hands word.” “Apeirogon” is a jazz-hands novel. It is possible to admire “One Thousand and One Nights” while having learned through hard experience that a writer who derives too much inspiration from it is generally one to avoid, unless what’s desired is a self-inflicted intellectual glitter-bombing. As befits a writer who ruminates about the nature of storytelling, there are 1,001 of these shards, each numbered, in a homage to “One Thousand and One Nights,” the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. To read “Apeirogon” is to watch him pick up the shards.

McCann takes their story and drops it to the ground, where it shatters. They have become friends and work together, through an organization called Combatants for Peace, to bring the opposing sides together. It’s about two fathers - Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian - who each lost a young daughter to senseless violence. Colum McCann’s new novel, “Apeirogon,” is based on an uplifting true story.

Apeirogon mccann