Apeirogon

During every lecture he gave with the Combatants for Peace group during its first two years, Bassam used to hold the candy bracelet that Abir bought before she died. On a hot day, the candy bracelet made his hands pink-colored as it mixed with his sweat. Later he was detained by the police at gunpoint and interrogated for five hours. Semtex can leave a pink residue on those who handle it.

In prison, Bassam and the others would collect errant materials and objects to create instruments. Amidst the squalor and decay of the prison conditions, the inmates did their best to keep their spirits up: They prayed, they chanted poetry, they fashioned traditional garments from kitchen rags and dishtowels.

Bassam’s first encounters with Hertzl the prison guard were contentious. This eventually changed. Hertzl mentions that Bassam’s prison number is an “amicable number,” which are “two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other” (97).

In prison, the guards would strip the prisoners naked to beat them. Bassam recalls the shame this brought him and the embarrassment. Hertzl was the only guard not to participate; in fact he even threw himself over Bassam to stop another baton blow. The other guards pressed Hertzl against the wall and headbutted him for this.

Like Bassam, Rami participated in the wars that occurred in the region. He drove an army truck for a medical team that brought in ammunition and carried dead soldiers out of the field.

McCann spends a lengthy digression on tunnel building throughout the region’s history. In the 1990s an American team with one Croatian member were hired to dig a tunnel in Israel. The Croatian member was very skilled with explosives. He eventually disappeared from the team.

McCann also includes several sections about a correspondence between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, wherein the former asks the latter if there was any way to suppress the human penchant for waging war. Freud answered that this was likely not possible; however, he replied, “anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war” (111).

After his daughter’s death, Bassam and his family go to England so Bassam can study the Holocaust at an English university. He is 42 years old. In England he conducted research: reading Primo Levi, Susan Sontag, Adorno, watching films centered on the Holocaust. This research informed his thesis, The Holocaust: The Use and Abuse of History and Memory. He arrives at his intellectual intervention in regards to the Israel/Palestine conflict: The occupation “was the common enemy. It was destroying both sides. He didn’t hate Jews, he said, he didn’t hate Israel. What he hated was being occupied, the humiliation of it, the strangulation, the daily degradation, the abasement. Nothing would be secure until it ended” (123).