Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40368 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Guardian
`Condensed and graceful . . . domestic details reveal political
reality, and colour and line are laid on swiftly together in sensuous
prose'

Daily Telegraph
`Exquisite, poignant, hopeful . . . deserved its place on the 2006
Man Booker shortlist'

Sarah Broadhurst
'Compelling, disturbing, moving, but also very haunting, the sort of book that won't leave you . . .Impressive and powerful’

Customer Reviews

My favourite author
This poignantly, achingly describes loss. Matar has a beautiful way with words and - especially for anyone who has ever experienced loss in its purest form - is truly relatable.

Great idea shame about the writing.
This book looks at life in Libya in the late 70's through the eyes of a child Suleiman. His father is involved in the pro democracy movement a dangerous pastime in any police state. The secret police become interested in his father's activities and life becomes very dangerous for the family. The novel examines how Suleiman and his mother cope.

I was quite excited by the premise of the book and was looking forward to the tale unfolding. The beginning of the book is quite well written and almost lyrical in places but this style seems to tail off as the novel progresses. In parts the author's powers of description seem to leave him completely and the style becomes clunky and unwieldy. Suleiman's mother is depressed and self medicates with alcohol, there is talk of her forced marriage to Suleiman's father. These themes are all hinted at but disappointingly, not really developed


The hero of the book Suleiman is struggling to become a man in very difficult circumstances but he is almost entirely unlikeable. At one stage he fails to help a drowning beggar choosing instead to push the struggling man further underwater with his foot. This incident and some of the others in the book are designed to show his confusion and hurt but they are so extreme that they make it almost impossible to empathies with him.

The book ends with him leaving to attend school in Egypt and his effective exile, this part of the book definitely left me wanting more, I did not feel that at the end of the book we really found out who he grew up to be.

Generally and excellent idea for a book by a writer who can clearly write but you get the feeling he got bored part of the way through and the rest of the book is not written with the care of the opening. A real shame.

Great Subject but poorly Rendered
For over a decade or so our literary culture and experience have been consistently broaden and enriched by a number of novels set in places such as Africa and the Indian sub-continent. By way of some examples, I am thinking of novels suchs as "The Famished Road" (1992) by Ben Okri, "The God of Small Things" (1998) by Arundhati Roy, "The Kite Runner" (2004), by Khaled Hosseini and very recently "The Inheritance of Loss" (2006) by Kiran Desai. Hisham Matar's "In the Country of Men" falls into that stable. For me this expansion of access to a wide range of literature is to be welcomed. A broad literary experience raises my consciousness about the wider world, it enables me to escape the parochialism of nationality and it has the potential of keeping me in touch with good writing. However, with access to a wider range of novels,and non fiction for that matter, we must not get swept away on a tide of expectation and judge all such novels as necessarily good.

Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men is set in Libya in 1979, on the tenth aniversary of the Libyan revolution. The book tells the story of 9 year old Suleiman's experience druing this period. On a personal level it outlines a snapshot of Suleiman's relationship with his parents and his growth as a young adolescent. It also places Suleiman, his family and friends in the context of the ramifications of Libya's revolution. Its themes are love, betrayal, culture and the impact of a revolution. It is a first person retropective narrative where the adult Suleiman looks back 15 years at events he observed and experienced at aged nine.

One early theme that appeared to be emerging was that the novel was going to be a critique of the narrator's male dominated culture. This is how Suleiman's mother describes her wedding day: "I walked up and down that room in my wedding dress wondering what kind of a face my executioner had. Because that's how I saw it: they passed the judgement and he, the stranger armed with the marriage contract signed by my father, was going to carry out the punishment." Unfortunately, this theme is not very well developed. It is a pity because it seemed central to the issue of a male dominated culture.

But this is also the story of a boy who becomes embroiled in what for him was the mysteries of a political revolution and the unexplained behaviour of adults such as his parents. Indeed, the relationship between Suleiman and his mother is a complex but nonetheless loving and close one. In themselves these are some very interesting themes. Yet I was unmoved, I was not engaged and I can only put it down to the broadly deadpan way in which Matar tells his story.

The story is told mainly by means of description of events as they unfold and is seen through the eyes of the young Suleiman. To keep in line with this perspective Matar sets out to keep his prose simple, direct and matter of fact. However, although we are aware of the perspective taken, this style of writing soon becomes dull and tedious. To illustrate the point I am making this is a brief passage that describes the interogation of Ustath Rashid on television: "The man looked thin. He faced slightly to one side. His kness were touching, he looked like a school boy in detention. He wore a white shirt under a grey jacket. His clothes seemed too big, his shirt collar almost touched his ears. His cheeks were grey with stubble." Have I missed the impact these continual short simple sentences are meant to convey?

Not surprisingly, as a first novel, Matar is yet to find an original and appropriately consistent voice. There are some short passages of lyrical beauty - take as an example the opening paragraph of the novel. But on the whole the mainly short, simple, and compound sentences gave an effect that produced a monotonous tone. This style did not aid expression of the range of emotions that one sensed Matar wanted to convey.

The question of whether this book is an autobiography or a novel is bound to arise. We know that many novels are autobiographically based so the fact that Matar draws on his life experience is not unusual. However, it seems to me that the book is much, much more autobiography than novel. it lacked the elements and craft that goes towards distinguishing fiction from non-fiction.

I struggled with this book that purports to be a novel rather than an autobiography or at least a memoir of a particular period. I kept hearing the author's rather than the narrator's voice. It seemed clear to me that the means and method of constructing this book was that or reporting "facts" rather than creative fictionalised writing. One might want to ask so what? My response would be that the book should stand as what it is and not be presented under the guise fo something else. To end on a positive note, as a memoir, in terms of giving the reader a glimpse of a particular period in Libya's history and Matar's life it works reasonably well.