My Amazon and Goodreads review of Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann (Rating 4) – As Exhaustive and Exhausting as the Search for Peace in the Mideast. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, about a pair of grieving fathers — one Palestinian and one Israeli — who have each lost a young daughter, moves like the Middle East peace process itself. The novel stumbles forward, stalls, retreats, goes off on tangents that alternately fascinate and bore to the point that you want to ignore and push past them. Mixing rat-a-tat revelation with lengthy exposition, the book inflames your brain, wrenches your gut, and ricochets your emotions from despair to hope. The last of these, hope, remains alive because of the unexpected bond between the men, friends and brothers who cross boundaries in the pursuit of peace. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired the inventiveness of this hybrid form of storytelling, a complex weave of straightforward narration, backwards loops, and intricate, superimposed embroidery. In truth, reading the book is as exhaustive and exhausting as the search for peace in the Mideast. Don’t give up.
