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But what ultimately links the two is the death of their daughters: 14-year-old Smadar Elhanan, killed by a suicide bomber and 10-year-old Abir Aramin, felled by a rubber bullet fired by an 18-year-old Israel border guard.Īs the men join forces, first in an organization called Combatants for Peace, and then in the Parents Circle, which brings together bereaved Palestinians and Israelis, the details of their respective histories and daily lives conjure a picture of the endless differences and indignities that foment misunderstanding and obstruct empathy at every turn in this Holy Land at odds with its people and itself. McCann, acclaimed author of “TransAtlantic” and the National Book Award-winning “Let the Great World Spin,” has taken for his subject the countably infinite facets of the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum, as embodied in the stories of two real-world characters, Bassam Aramin, a 52-year-old Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, a 70-year-old Israeli Jew.īoth men have played a part in the seemingly intractable violence of their homeland: Bassam as a teenager jailed for seven years for a grenade attack on an Israeli jeep Rami as a soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. With this figure - in the title, and then in expanding definitions - Colum McCann offers us a template for reading his new book, which is a novel but not in any traditional sense.

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.