Reading

I have been asked to lead a book discussion for my temple as part of our summer adult education programming. I had narrowed it down to two, Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland and Apeirogon, by Colum McCann, when I read this in an interview with the environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert:

Kafka once wrote, “We ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it? I think it’s true that the very best works of literature…leave us wrecked and, at the same time, more alive.

During COVID, I have read many books that fit that definition, but I often find myself avoiding the ones that will leave me wrecked – I have daily newspapers for that. I have been looking for books that move me, but gently. If the endings aren’t happy, they are at least hopeful.

But what I read for myself and what provides an opportunity for discussion are two different things. When it came time to select a book for a discussion, I chose the more upsetting novel, Apeirogon.  Florence Adler Swims Forever, which I enjoyed, touched on anti-Semitism in Atlantic City in the 1930’s, restrictive US immigration policies that cost many Jews trying to leave Nazi Germany their lives, and the circumscribed role of women. But although none of these issues have gone away, the novel didn’t feel current or compelling enough to sustain a group discussion. Apeirogon, which I have not yet finished, is difficult to follow. In geometry, an apeirogon is a “polygon with a countably infinite number of sides.”  The novel has hundreds of sections, some as small as a phrase. It is sometimes hard to know how a section, or “side,” contributes to the overall shape, which is the story of two fathers, a Palestinian and an Israeli, each of whom has a daughter who is murdered by the other’s side. It is a story designed to be a blow, if not to the skull than to the heart.