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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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A luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Booker Prize–nominated and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.
1
It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone's chest, least of all one's own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King's Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking across the concourse, I feel I am seeing right into him, perceiving him more accurately than ever before, as though all along, during the two decades that we have known one another, our friendship has been a study and now, ironically, just after we have bid one another farewell, his portrait is finally coming into view. And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching, like someone walking toward us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away. No one has ever been a nearer neighbor to my heart. I am convinced, as I watch him go to his train for Paris, that city where the two of us first met so long ago and in the most unlikely way, that he is carrying, right where the rib cages meet, an invisible burden, one, I believe, I can discern from this distance.
When he still lived here in London, hardly a week would pass without us taking a walk, either through the park or along the river. We sometimes got into a debate, usually concerning an obscure literary question, arguments that, perhaps like all arguments, concealed deeper disagreements. I would sometimes, to my regret, for the gesture has always displeased me, tap my forefinger on his chest and let my palm rest there for a fleeting moment, as though to keep whatever it was that I believed I had placed there stable, and I would once again take note of the distinct pattern of his ribs, the strange way his bones protruded, as if in constant expectation of an attack.
He does not know that I am still here. He thinks I have left, rushed off to the dinner engagement I told him I was already late for. I am not sure why I lied."Who are you eating with?" he asked.
"No one you know," I replied.
He looked at me then as if we had already parted ways and the present was the past, I standing at the shore and he on board the ship sailing into the future.
That burden in the chest, I can see, has rolled his shoulders back a little, causing his hips to fall forward so as to compensate and stop him falling, at the slightest push, face-first. And yet he does look, from this distance, like a man possessed by action, moving forward, determined to enter his new life.
These past years since 2011, since the Libyan Revolution and all that had followed it—the countless failures and missed opportunities, the kidnappings and assassinations, the civil war, entire neighborhoods flattened, the rule of militias—changed Hosam. Evidence of this was in his posture but also in his features: the soft tremble in the hands, perceptible each time he brought a cigarette to his mouth, the doubt around the eyes, the cautious climate in them, and a face like a landscape liable to bad weather.
Soon after the start of the revolution, he returned home and, perhaps naturally, a distance opened between us. On the rare occasions he visited London, we were easy in one another's company but less full-hearted somehow. I am sure he too noticed the shift. Sometimes he stayed with me, sleeping on the sofa in my studio flat, sharing the same room, where we could speak in the dark till one of us fell asleep. Most of the time, though, he got a room at a small hotel in Paddington. We would meet there, and the neighborhood, arranged around the train station, which fills the surrounding streets with a transitory air, made us both feel like visitors and accentuated the sense that our friendship had become a replica of what it had once been when he lived here and we shared the city the way honest laborers share tools. But now when he...
Excerpted from My Friends by Hisham Matar. Copyright © 2024 by Hisham Matar. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The title of Hisham Matar's My Friends takes on affectionate but mournful tones as its story unfolds. For the narrator, Khaled, friendships have been both fundamentally necessary and painful. When we first meet him, he has just said goodbye to his friend Hosam Zowa, an author whose work he discovered as a teenager and later met in Paris when the two were exiled from Libya in the era of the repressive Qaddafi regime. In the present, opening timeline, some years after the Libyan Revolution of 2011, Hosam is moving to the US with his wife and child, and Khaled senses their relationship ending. From here, he begins to tell his life story, irrevocably marked by his presence at the 1984 shooting of anti-Qaddafi protesters from the Libyan embassy in London, where as a young man studying literature abroad he was wounded and possibly put on the regime's radar, making it unsafe for him to return to his homeland for the foreseeable future.
Khaled's two closest friends during the decades following the shooting, Hosam and Mustafa (a fellow protester also injured at the embassy), have suffered in ways similar to him but are more eager than he to hit back at the world — both end up participating in the eventual overthrow of Qaddafi. Khaled has no desire to see military action, and the trauma he has experienced seems to separate him from conventional life, leaving him to lose himself in books and to foster meaningful but flexible connections outside the framework of marriage or traditional family. "[V]iolence demands translation," he observes, "I will never have the words to explain what it is like to be shot, to lose the ability to return home or to give up on everything I expected my life to be, or why it felt as though I had died that day." And as relationships between friends, unlike romantic or familial ones, are arguably the most inherently unconventional, the most undefined and open to reinvention but the most difficult in which to find security, it seems only natural that friendships form the stage on which the dramas of his existence play out.
Khaled finds a kindred spirit in a professor at the University of Edinburgh who acts as a mentor figure to him and provides material assistance after the shooting, fabricating an employment reference and offering financial support. His school friend Rana helps him manage the details of safely beginning a new life. Hannah, an off-and-on lover, is the first new person to whom he tells the truth about his injury, and they maintain a bond over time. All these characters have their own lives apart from Khaled, but together they give him a structure that allows him to find himself again, to begin to grow something out of the nothing he was left with.
Still, reminders of a somber reality lie around every corner. He attempts to speak to family members in code during his rare phone calls, envisioning a scrutinizing government official listening in, and considers the difficult choices made by other Libyans abroad — writers, intellectuals, and public figures — such as Mohammed Mustafa Ramadan, a real-life journalist and critic of Qaddafi who worked for the BBC and was murdered in London by men suspected to be associated with the regime. In Matar's novel, Khaled became acquainted with Hosam's work when Ramadan read one of his stories on the air in place of the news.
Khaled meets Hosam years later by near-magical happenstance, and Matar excels at crafting these kinds of fragile, ethereal moments — calling attention to how life thrives on coincidence and intuition, and revealing the wonder of a world connected by literature and other media even (or especially) as art and communication is suppressed. The second half of the book isn't quite as effective as the first in this vein, and the characters' centrality to key historical events begins to feel artificial and unnecessary. But overall, My Friends is confident in how it hews close to its protagonist's inner landscape even as it pulls in global concerns, in how it takes unexpected turns past and straight through history.
As Khaled endeavors to tell the story of his friendship with Hosam, a source of heartache and a loose throughline of his narrative, he reveals much about himself alone and the community of people around him, showing the small, delicate ways he has made an adequate place for himself among them. His decisions are not always comprehensible to friends and family, but his presence seems to be as key to others as theirs to him. Hosam will eventually leave London, but only after Khaled helps him build a life there that makes another life possible.
Matar's novel is a quietly humming beast, a low-flying glide over a specific cross-section of contemporary history, but also a bittersweet exploration of how it feels to have vital, formative experiences of friendship, and then to outgrow one's friends or to be outgrown by them in moments that are likewise defining. "My friends never stopped wanting a different life," Khaled reflects at one point, after speaking to his mother on the phone, "But I have managed, Mother, not to want a different life most of the time and that is some achievement."
Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children
Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of The Magician
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Omar El Akkad, author of American War
Rated 5 out of 5
by Diane
Profoundly moving
This novel was a gripping read and I understand now better than ever the heartbreaking tragedy of exile. I am impressed by the author’s skill at developing a compelling, well-paced plot, believable and sympathetic characters, and a theme all too relevant to our world.
In My Friends by Hisham Matar, the classical Arabic poem The Epistle of Forgiveness (Risalat al-Ghufran) by the Syrian writer Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri makes multiple appearances. Main character Khaled refers to his copy of the work, given to him by his father when he left Libya for university in Scotland, as "the most precious object I possessed." Later, when applying to study literature at a different college in England, Khaled is asked whether he recognizes a passage read aloud. When he can't place the text, the interviewers tell him it's from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and express surprise that he hasn't read it. When they ask what he has read, he mentions Seneca, Jean Rhys, and Hosam Zowa (a Libyan writer existing in the world of Matar's book) before trotting out al-Ma'arri, turning the tables on them: "Three hundred years before Dante … he wrote The Epistle of Forgiveness, in which a poet descends to the underworld. Have you really never heard of it?"
Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri was born in the town of Maarat al-Numan in 973 CE. He is believed to have been raised in a mixed-faith community that included different denominations of Muslims as well as Christians, and in a family with open-minded views towards religion. He lost some of his eyesight due to having smallpox as a child, was likely blind by the time he reached middle age, and probably composed work through dictation. Educated by his father, he also studied under a number of well-known scholars. In addition to his poetry, he is known for philosophy and literary criticism. A vegetarian with an ascetic lifestyle, he was a social justice advocate who believed that people should not have children, to spare them from the suffering of life. His pessimistic humanism and critical views on religion were considered controversial at the time, and still sometimes are.
The Epistle of Forgiveness is written as a reply from al-Ma'arri to a letter from the grammarian Ibn al-Qarih. In the work, al-Ma'arri imagines that Ibn al-Qarih has died and entered the afterlife, where he travels through heaven and hell and meets famous figures, including Adam and Eve and dead writers.
As Khaled observes, the plot echoes that of Dante's internationally known Divine Comedy, and an English translation by G. Brackenbury from 1943 even uses the title "A Divine Comedy." The theory that al-Ma'arri's poem may have influenced Dante has been floated but largely dismissed. Translator Gregor Schoeler suggests that it's more likely the two works had a common influence: The Arabic Kitab al-Mi'raj, which depicts Muhammad's ascension to heaven and Islamic views of the underworld. The text had been translated into several European languages in Dante's time, whereas The Epistle of Forgiveness was not then known in Europe. A key difference between The Divine Comedy and al-Ma'arri's work is that while Dante wrote from a sincere religious perspective, The Epistle of Forgiveness appears to contain layers of irony and can be interpreted in multiple ways, with al-Ma'arri seeming at times to mock common beliefs.
Dr. Tom Shakespeare, a public health advocate and sociologist who has analyzed al-Ma'arri's work from the perspective of disability, praises his creations in an interview with ArabLit: "What I hope is that these volumes reach beyond scholars of Islam or the Arab world … The idea that this poet is writing in the eleventh century! Now, I studied Old English at Cambridge, and I read Beowulf, and I read other works of that time, and they are nowhere near the sophistication and the philosophical and dramatic interest of these writings."
Drawing of Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri from 1961 Egyptian work Sayr mulhimah, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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