PositiveThe Scotland Herald...what appears to be a bloody biographical symmetry does not nearly cover what McCann is attempting with Apeirogon ... The resulting book is arranged in 1,001 numbered sections, like the Arabian Nights, running up to 500 and back down to zero. The longest of these are the most novelistic, rendering Aramin and Elhanan as characters, and building discrete narratives around the facts of their cases ... The tension in those passages between natural empathy and tonal neutrality makes them hot to the touch. Your face burns reading them ... all these semi-digressions build a cumulative power, an almost cosmic sense of context. The meaning of the whole is encoded in every part.
