An Excellent Audio Book / Information from Interviews with Matar

books:


	• In the Country of Men Hisham Matar Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

"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.

for more information click here

Technically, well done.

The novel's theme is accommodation vs. integrity, taking place in Libya as Khadafy is consolidating his power. Technically the work is nicely done, but I cannot muster any enthusiasm for it. It is told through the eyes of a 9 year old. Matar employs adult language, but maintains the sensibility of a child in his narration. Perhaps because of this, Mata does not do enough with his adult characters. Also, the attempted resistance comes across as so naïve.

for more information click here

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.

for more information click here

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 "not only is the book is beautifully written; the reader is also 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.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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.

From the Hardcover edition.

for more information click here

hot