South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Matar believes literature lies in untranslatable experiences
Pulitzer winner returns to fiction with story of Libyan exiles’ long friendship
Talk to friends of writer Hisham Matar, and he has many, and soon they’ll bring up one of his more notorious pastimes: Have you ever seen how he looks at art?
Matar has a habit born from his early years living in London, a period of immense grief, of choosing a painting and spending hours with it each week. He would take lunch breaks at the National Gallery with Diego Velázquez, Duccio or the Lorenzetti brothers, sticking with the same piece of art for months until he felt it was time to move on. And even though most of his friends admit they can’t match Matar’s sustained attention in a gallery, they agree this capacity for looking is essential to his character, central to everything from the way he walks through a city to the books that he writes.
Looking at an artwork with him and comparing impressions later, as another said, it’s as if only Matar saw it in full color.
“He has a way of changing the air you’re in,” said Gini Alhadeff, a writer and translator, “as if time stops and you can see everything.”
Matar is best known for his Pulitzer-winning autobiography, “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the
Land In Between,” a dual lament for his homeland, Libya, and his father, a critic of Moammar Gadhafi whose exact fate remains unknown. But he began as a fiction writer, with two austere, elegiac novels about boys in the shadow of absent fathers; his debut, “In the Country of Men,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His new novel, “My Friends,” his first in 13 years, is his return to the form.
The book, recently published by Random House, follows three Libyan exiles in London and their decadeslong friendships. Khaled, a bookish man from Benghazi, anchors the story, along with Mustafa, whom he meets at university in Scotland, and Hosam, an enigmatic writer. The story follows them through the Arab Spring, through Gadhafi’s overthrow and toward the promise of a new political future in Libya.
The novel draws on themes Matar has examined for years — solitude, deracination, the totality of grief — but is also his most substantive exploration of friendship. The subject fascinates him and has profoundly shaped his world, as someone who has lived apart from his family since he was 15.
“Relationships bring us alive,” Matar, 53, said during an interview from his studio in London. But while familial bonds and romantic ties are freighted with expectations, he continued, friendship is all the more exciting for its promiscuity. “We usually have more than one. We usually have them at the same time. And if we are fortunate, they could be our longest relationships.”
Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents. At the time, his father, Jaballa Matar, was working for Libya’s permanent mission to the United Nations. Three years later, the Matars moved back to Libya but left for Cairo in 1979, after it became clear that remaining under the Gadhafi autocracy, which came to power in a 1969 coup, was unsafe. More than three decades would pass before Hisham Matar returned.
In 1990, Jaballa Matar was detained by Egyptian police and taken to Libya, where he was jailed in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison, the site of a 1996 massacre that claimed about 1,200 lives and countless other horrors. Hisham Matar and his family have never received a clear answer about what happened to Jaballa, or even to his remains, despite an international campaign and several exchanges with one of Gadhafi’s sons, Saif alIslam Gadhafi.
“Families are ingenious at teaching us how to love,” Matar said. Friendship, on the other hand, is even more curious because “it implicates you into another’s life” in a way that’s not at all fatalistic. “It has nothing to do with blood.”
“My Friends” is told over the course of a walk one of the characters, Khaled, takes through London in 2016. As he crosses the city, the narrative unfolds in a loose, discursive fashion, with Khaled reflecting on his early years in Benghazi, where he first encountered Hosam’s writing; the life he built in the United Kingdom; and his warring instincts, particularly about home. The heady optimism throughout Libya in the wake of the revolution has dissipated, and the three friends, now in middle age, have chosen vastly different lives in the aftermath.
The story is grounded in several true events beyond the Arab Spring. A 1984 anti-Gadhafi demonstration in London is its pivotal moment: Khaled and Mustafa are injured at the protest, which turns deadly, and their involvement forecloses the immediate possibility of going home.
“One of the things that I am interested in is how human consciousness is forever modulating, traversing, trying to measure the distance between documentable fact and the firmament of our interiority,” Matar said. “That distance, to me, is really where literature sits: the untranslatable, the unsayable.”
In “My Friends,” Khaled enrolls at university in Edinburgh, Scotland, and encounters a professor who changes his life. During a lecture about Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A.H.H,” an elegy for his friend, the professor points to two “untranslatable experiences” in the work. “The first is the friendship, which, like all friendships, one cannot fully describe to anyone else. The second is grief, which again, like all forms of grief, is horrible exactly for how uncommunicable it is.”
The lecture could double as an overture to Matar’s own work. “If I had to point to the crowning reason, the intellectually interesting, crowning reason why I like to write or why language, for me, is my craft,” he said, “it’s exactly to do with the fact that it is always bound to fail.
“But it’s such a magnificent failure.”