Corrupting Everything In Its Grasp

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	• In the Country of Men Hisham Matar Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One's boy's summer . . .

It is the summer of 1979 in Tripoli, Libya, and the narrator of this novel remembers a boyhood year in which his life is forever changed by the repressive regime of Col. Quaddafi's revolutionary government. Little aware of what is going on around him, the boy struggles to understand the strange behavior of his father, who as we learn is an educated businessman with democratic aspirations for his country. Left for long periods of time alone with his mother, the boy puzzles over signs of her growing anxiety during a government crackdown on dissidents. As she talks with him, we begin to understand her own story of being forcibly married against her will at the age of fourteen.

Swept up in heightening waves of dread, the reader is taken by the novel into a sunlit nightmare of surveillance, torture, and public executions. Given to casual acts of cruelty himself, the boy is portrayed unsentimentally, and it's possible to connect all the novel's acts of disregard for humanity along a single spectrum. At the end, fifteen years later, the narrator looks back with regret at a life interrupted by political forces that have left him distrustful and alienated. It is a story that could be told by many in a world where authoritarian governments hold power and people in the hundreds of thousands have been uprooted from their homelands.

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Childhood during turbulent times

The most significant, earth-shattering, all-encompassing events viewed through the eyes of a child. Cynicism, blunt realism, ruthlessness of the adult world intertwined with the curiosity, naiveté, sense of incomprehension, unquestioning devotion and innocent cruelty of the young.

Suleiman, a 9 year old boy recounts life in Libya, during a time of political unrest and turmoil following Qaddafi's revolution, in a neighborhood where the number of foes equals that of friends, in a house where a mother has given up on a life of shattered dreams and lost hope and where a father chases vainly after political chimeras disregarding everything and everyone irrelevant to the cause.

Beautiful and evocative narrative by Hisham Matar in a book dominated by love, betrayal and doubt and where the sins of the past come to haunt a precarious present and ensure a volatile future.

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Corrupting Everything In Its Grasp

Reading this book is not a pleasant experience -- it has more to offer than mere pleasure. It grips you like a vise while you read it and haunts you for a long time afterwards. The book is short and claustrophobic, taking place almost entirely in one home. It is an intensive exploration of the way a regime like Qaddafi's corrupts everything in its grasp, from overall social structure to the workings of the individual mind.

The plot proceeds mostly by hints and implications, producing a gradually increasing sense of dread that is appropriate to this subject matter. The author's portrayal of the protagonist, a nine-year-old boy, is courageous and completely unsentimental, exposing the cruelty and selfishness of this child; his passionate, jealous attachment to his mother; and his ruined spirit as an adult.

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A quick read about Lybia

I read this over a weekend. This poor boy is lost with what is happening in his country, his mother medicating herself and father in his own world... this child becomes codependent and tries to please others. No one stops and talks to this child and the one that does is a "bad man"
Who is a fault? Mother? Father? Government? All the above? What can be taken from this may be the importance of standing back and communicating with children especially in the hard times. He was somewhat forgotten. You feel the emptiness in his adulthood.

Liked it a lot

A nice study of characters & culture. I spent a good deal of the book cringing watching the stress exerted on the characters squeeze out dark behavior. While I was rooting for them to find strength, I couldn't blame them when they didn't.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5

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