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A Novel
by Hisham Matar
Book Reviewed by: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.
Khaled 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. 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. 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...continued
Full Review
(871 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
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 ...
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Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Children
Hisham Matar's My Friends recounts an exile's life shattered by violence, yet sustained, fiercely if complicatedly, by friendship. An unforgettable novel—wise, urgent, and profound—from one of our era's great writers.
