The meaning that emerges out of the fragments of the novel, then, is greater than the sum of its parts. One seldom notices when one is caught in the lyrical web of stories and is taken on a circular trip - for instance, reading about rings around birds’ feet to tiny bird-feeders made of hollowed-out bullets to the rubber bullet that killed Bassam’s daughter, one is led back to rings, drawn around the photographs of dead soldiers. Yet, McCann knows exactly when to pull the thread to give the story the right twist and tug at the heartstrings of the reader. This multifaceted novel, whose title means a shape with a countably infinite number of sides, tells the story of an unlikely friendship amid the. The individual vignettes talk of disparate things, connected by a loose thread of associations - of words, memories, history and, at times, trivia. Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Random House). The number of sections tellingly refers to the One Thousand and One Nights - tales “gathered at different times in myriad places”. As such, Apeirogon makes an impressive attempt to push the boundaries of established structures of the postmodern novel. Some of these consist of a single line, some just an image. The novel is woven around this concept: it comprises 1,001 vignettes - after reaching the 500th piece, the segments count backwards to 1, with a single story in between. 29 Reviews Reviews arent verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when its identified NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A quite extraordinary novel. An apeirogon, McCann explains, is a figure with infinite sides that “approaches the shape of a circle, but a magnified view of a small piece appears to be a straight line”.
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