By: Hisham Matar Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Dial Press Trade Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 256 Publication Date: February 26, 2008 Release Date: February 26, 2008
Product Description: Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie?
Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television.
In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.
A Tedious Novel with an unlikable narrator When I purchased the book, I was quite interested in the setting and eager to read it because a good friend of mine had been living in Libya when Qaddafi staged his coup; my friend barely escaped the country with his life.
But what a disappointment the book turned out to be.
My main problem with the novel was that the narrative was told from the perspective of a supremely spoiled and obnoxious child who misinterprets nearly every event that occurs. Because I disliked the narrator so much, I found myself detached from the events and characters, and ultimately uninterested in the outcome. Towards the end of the book, I even found myself hoping the state security police would abduct this petulant child and torture him. Out of stubbornness I finished the book, but it took a long time.
Disappointing In the Country of Men is basically story about life in Libya after the Muammar El Qaddafi's revolution. The year is 1979 and the narrator is nine years old Suleiman so we see revolution and its consequences through the eyes of nine years old boy. Boy who was much protected from the truth by his parents. It was interesting how some obvious facts (obvious for us, adults) are presented in some naïve language of a kid. We have impression that we are sailing through the sea surrounded with peaks of icebergs. The difference is that we (adults) are aware what's beneath the surface unlike the child who is telling us the story.
Then there is one nice picture about customs in the Muslim country and again position of woman in it. Suleiman's mother has been forced into the marriage when her brother saw her in the café with mixed company. Immediately "husband hunt" begins and the Scheherazade-like story. Therefore she was very unhappy with her marriage but in the same time in the husband's absence she's even more miserable and becomes "ill". Her "illness" is another peak of an iceberg and I must say I liked how Matar has described bond between mother and son making her "illness" something sacredly secret.
Suleiman's family is relatively rich. His father is businessman often on the trip abroad but also man who is part of democratic wing in new Libya. Wing you don't want to be part in post Revolutionary, Qaddafi's Libya; full of secret police, man in dark suits and sunglasses, land where national TV is broadcasting public execution of "traitors of the revolution"; where phone lines are tapped, etc. And inevitably consequence for being wrong winged came. But even then it's a peak of an iceberg.
Matar has done great job in conveying kid's confusion toward all the events around him. Politics is absolutely incomprehensible to him; he doesn't have a clue what his father supports or what he actually is doing in spite the fact that some glimpses have been presented accidentally to him. He is confronted with the mechanism of the regime when secret service is following their car or watching his house or taking away his friend's father but somehow he manages to not recognize that as something bad. He's explaining that in the most impossible ways. On the other hand his parents aren't teaching their son anything, they are worsening situation even more and make him confused `till the breaking point when he start to scream (finally!):" You always lie. I am not a child and you always lie." In the meanwhile I was so irritated with the kid and had to (too) often remind myself that he's only a child.
[Possibly SPOILER]
But what disappointed me the most are last few chapters when we are actually see that the story tells 24 Suleiman and not nine years old boy. I've found myself confused why on earth he made this unnecessary contrast with the rest of the novel who has convinced us that the narrator is a boy? The whole novel was through the eyes of a kid, who is not kid anymore and therefore it completely spoils the earlier approach. Now when I know Suleiman is an adult I'd expect story from a point of view of an adult person.
The story itself is nothing new. It's more/less the same story from a country under oppressive regime. There are only few specifically Libyan spices in this dish. Indeed this is sad and sometimes poignant story but is that should be enough?
Very well written!! I enjoyed this book; however, it is one that you must concentrate on every word. A little slow moving and yet very interesting perspective on the life in Libya in the late 70's and early 80's. Very interesting to me was the fact that this story was as seen through the eyes of a 9 year old. Having a 9 year old of my own, really related the significance of this story to me personally.
"Elucidating, disturbing ..... worthwhile" This is a story of reckless parenting and its consequences amidst the turbulent upheavals of a modern totalitarian state. It reveals the risks and penalties a young boy must try to overcome having to adapt to a dysfunctional family and an unyielding tyrannical society.
The novel suceeds in illuminating the realities of living under military dictatorship: the terror, threats and betrayals, the regime's ultimate demand for control and submission, its insidiousness, and, finally, the self justifications and ignoble acts of the populace. Hisham Matar cunningly offers Suleiman, an unsophisticated 9 year old as witness and reporter. In the literary tradition of such juvenile narrators, young Sulieman stands apart. The confusing irregularities within his family cause him to interact blindly in the social and political turmoil tearing at the lives of his family, their friends and cohorts. Suleiman's actions are, in turn, naive, fallible, erratic and dangerous.
His mother, twenty three year old, Bu Suleiman, has already endured years of unhappy marriage when her husband becomes involved in a small network of vainly hopeful conspirators intent upon inciting unrest within the prevailing Qadaffi Revolution. She alone anticipates their failure and the real costs attendant to her husband's vague politcal wishes. But Bu Suleiman is much less circumspect about the effects she is producing in her only son. The recognition the boy craves from his absent father and the over solicitous attention he willingly absorbs from his alcoholic mother combine to rob him of his chance for normal development. His rudderless existence makes him prey to behaviors that he, himself, doesn't recognize or understand. His personal convulsions and eccentricities cost him friendships and eventually present risks to the people he admires most.
While the revolutionary regime selects 'enemies of the state' for its show trials, the real enemies to civil life are seen to include the menial functionaries working for the regime in the Suleiman's own neighborhood. These lurkers qualify for their posts by possessing a lack of conscience or an emotional connection to any of those around them. This personal narrative details some of the causes of an incomplete development in young Suleiman that is likely akin to similar emotional scarring and bitterness to be found in the earlier lives of the book's totalitarian aparratchiks. The 9 year old protagonist is ingloriously saved from this fate by his mother whose ministrations, nevertheless, leave a deep imprint on the adult Suleiman as he retells his story to us.
This psychological theme and its political setting are successfully counterpoised to provide an effect upon readers that is both permanent and enlightening, and which forms the basis for giving the book 4 stars. This may not be a book to love, but its substance will be usefully remembered and appreciated. Matar writes well, often very well. The author's future work should be widely anticipated.
An Excellent Audio Book / Information from Interviews with Matar THE AUDIO BOOK (Unabridged) Though I have yet to listen to the CDs, my mother reports that "the reader is terrific." By this she especially means 1) that he read slowly enough for her to digest the material and savor the language and 2) that he did not overly dramatize it.
FROM INTERVIEWS WITH THE AUTHOR By the time I was ready to write a review of the book, too many had already been written. However, because my book group thought that the information I'd gleaned from others' interviews with the author added depth to their appreciation of his novel, I decided to post some of it here. And where relevant, I also added further background information to the comments of others.
In interview after interview, Matar insists that Suleiman's story is not his story. "Suleiman's emotionally volatile and unpredictable mother plays a big role in his life whereas my mother and father were both very stable and reliable," Matar explains, adding that he had to research "how children of parents with drinking problems are affected."
However, says Matar, "I deliberately placed the action in the landscape I remember. The house is very much our house, the sea very much the sea I remember....The book was in a way an attempt to revisit the haunts of my youth and thus to try to wean myself of the country I had left and haven't been able to return to for over 28 years now....I failed, of course."
And, according to Matar, "the backdrop of Suleiman's story--the political unrest that was taking place--is based on things that did happen....But when I was Suleiman's age, it was very subtle. I sensed there were some things you could not say. You'd be sitting around the dining table and one of your uncles would say something and everyone would fall silent because they suddenly remembered there was a child at the table and he might carry these words elsewhere and then somebody would get arrested."
There were also public interrogations on TV, which Matar describes in retrospect as "very surreal." And he did occasionally see people he knew, including an uncle, being interrogated even though his parents tried to keep him from seeing any. But by the time he was 15, he says, "My father thought I was old enough to know what was going on in my country" and required him to watch a video of a famous execution. "It was deeply unsettling to me," said Matar, adding that he "loosely based the execution scene" in his novel on it.
Matar has been criticized by some for not writing a more political novel. According to the "Newstatesman," for example, "[Matar's] account provides us with no insight into the Libyan politics of the period, nor, oddly, does it generate any sympathy for the dissidents." Perhaps the reason some expected the book to do both is because of the fate of Matar's father.
Born in NYC while his father was serving briefly as a diplomat with the Libyan mission to the U.N., Matar and his family returned to Libya when he was 3. In 1979, when Matar was 9, his father's name appeared on a list the government wanted to interrogate, not because he was political but, explains Matar, "simply because he was a middle-class intellectual and a successful businessman" and thus "seen by the regime as bourgeoise." The family fled to Kenya and ultimately settled in Cairo, Egypt. It was not until then that Matar's father became a political activist and, says Matar, "began writing against the Libyan regime and organizing other exiles to unite and overthrow Qaddafi."
In 1990, when Matar was in school in England, his father, in Matar's words, "went to the front door and never returned." Though the family tried to find out what had happened to him, all the Egyptian government would tell them, says Matar, was that "he was being held because he'd crossed the line and done too much against one of their allies." Two years later, Matar's father managed to smuggle a letter out of the Libyan prison he'd been in since day 3; the next year they got another. That was l995 and the last time anyone heard from him, in spite of much help from many, including from Amnesty International.
In 2003, Matar wrote a moving piece for Amnesty International about the effect his father's disappearance has had on him and his family. "Torturous," was the word he used to describe the "vacancy" he's since felt. Asked recently how this had influenced his novel, Matar replied, "I don't know. One of the most difficult passages to write was the return of the father after he'd been tortured."
Though Matar's novel focuses on a young boy's inner turmoil and his mother's bitterness/ frustration rather than on Libyan politics, Matar has not been silent about the latter. In February of '07, Matar wrote an op ed piece for "The New York Times" entitled "Seeing What We Want to See in Qaddafi." In it he was highly critical of the 2004 deal the U.S. and Britain had made with the dictator in exchange for his help in their war on terror. One of his reasons, he wrote, was that "no country made it a condition in negotiations that Libya investigate the countless cases of the 'disappeared.' None of them compelled the Qaddafi government to even address the massacre at Abu Salim prison where, one night in June of 1996, more than 1,000 political prisoners were shot and killed." Matar now suspects that his father was one of the victims.
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