In the Country of Men

Susannah Tarbush Al_Hayat - 22/08/06//

When the Libyan writer Hisham Matar delivered the manuscript of his first novel "In the Country of Men" to his literary agent in London on a Friday, the agent warned him that he was unlikely to hear for two or three weeks whether any publisher was interested in the book.

But by the following Tuesday a fierce bidding war had broken out between several British publishers to acquire the rights to the book. Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books, won the auction and awarded Matar a deal for two books. Viking published the book in July and it has had generally excellent reviews.

"In the Country of Men" is a moving and deeply humane novel, beautifully written in a style that is poetic and economical. On its cover the South African novelist J M Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, describes it as "a poignant story of a child exposed too early to the brutalities of Libyan politics."

The novel vividly recreates the Libyan capital Tripoli in summer 1979. The nine-year old narrator Suleiman tries to make sense of the bewildering political and family events around him. His father is involved in an underground movement linked to university students whose slogan is "we are not against the revolution, we are against the extremes of the revolution." The movement is ruthlessly crushed, and Suleiman gets drawn into various betrayals.

It is not only in Britain that the novel created much excitement among publishers and in the book trade. Before publication in Britain, the rights to publication had been sold in 14 countries. In the US, the novel will be published by the Dial Press, a division of Random House, in January 2007.

Although the novel does not yet have an Arabic publisher, a translation into Arabic is being carried out by the Iraqi short story writer and literary critic Luay Abdulilah. Matar says that of all the translations of his novel, the Arabic one is "without a doubt the most important one to me."

He hopes that the Arabic translation will be read in Libya "not for any political reason but to share it with people" who have lived in the sort of environment he depicts.

One reason for the intense interest in the novel is that it takes the reader into a time and place previously unknown in fiction written in English. Matar is an urgent, fresh voice from the generation of Libyans that was born after the 1969 revolution.

Before publication, Viking compared the book to "The Kite Runner", the enormously successful first novel by Afghan-American novelist Khaled Hossseini. But despite some similarities between the two novels, there are significant differences (see BOX).

Matar was born in 1970 in New York, where his father Jaballah Hamed Matar was a UN diplomat. He grew up in Libya, but in 1979 his family fled the country because his father's name was on a list of people wanted for interrogation. In March 1990, while Matar was at school in England, his father was abducted in Cairo and taken back to Libya.

The family received an audio cassette and a few letters from Jaballah, which were smuggled out of prison in Libya, but since 1995 they have heard nothing and do not even know if he is alive or dead.

These agonising details of Matar's own life, and the fact that nine-year old Suleiman is the same age Matar was when he left Libya, have led some to speculate that his novel is autobiographical. But Matar denies this. "I think that a writer's work and the writer are really two separate fields, " he says.

As for politics, he says: "I don't see myself as a political writer at all." He adds: "My work doesn't express my opinions about my personal political beliefs. When I sit down and write, I don't sit down to prove something."

The novel conveys the texture of life in a society where "walls have ears," where informing on your fellow citizens is "the national sport", and where informers and mukhabarat are known as "antennae".

Cars full of men from Revolutionary Committees follow people and lurk outside their houses, and a "third person" often listens in on telephone conversations. Among the family's neighbours is Ustath Jaber, "a man of the Mokhabarat, 'able to put people behind the sun' as I had heard it said many times."

Suleiman is an only child, and is often alone and in his own world. But despite the difficulties of his life, and his frequent traumas and uncertainties, he is a boy capable of joy and of exhilaration. He has a sense of fun and amusingly describes various characters and his father's different business ventures. (On one occasion Baba's open truck returns from Sweden loaded with dark moist trees, and on another full of cows from Scotland).

Suleiman's father's best friend is his next door neighbour Ustath Rashid, a gentle professor of art history at El-Fateh University. Ustath Rashid's son Kareem is Suleiman's best friend, despite being three years older.

Ustath Rashid is seized from home by Revolutionary Committee men. In a particularly harrowing scene, Suleiman witnesses on television Ustath Rashid undergoing a trial by a revolutionary court in the National Basketball Stadium, and then being executed by hanging while crowds cheer wildly and chant revolutionary slogans.

Matar explores with subtlety and sensitivity the complex relationships between mother, father and son. Baba is a distant figure who frequently travels on business. When he is at home he immerses himself in his newspapers and books.

The boy yearns for affection from his father. "The time I felt closest to him was when he was unaware of my presence: watching him spread his library of neckties on the bed, for example, humming an unfamiliar tune." While his father is on the run from Revolutionary Committee men, Suleiman is puzzled and angry when his mother and an Egyptian friend of the family burn Baba's beloved books.

Suleiman's relationship with his unhappy mother is full of the secrets she confides to him. In her husband's absence she drinks the "medicine" she obtains from the baker, and becomes "ill". The medicine is of course illicit alcohol. In her bouts of drunkenness she tells Suleiman of the "black day" on which she was forced to marry his father.

The "High Council" of the men in his mother's family had forced her to marry his father, a stranger, at the age of only 14 after one of her brothers saw her and another girl drinking cappuccinos in the Italian Coffee House with two boys. She gave birth to Suleiman when she was only 15. Suleiman often dreams of saving his mother.

Suleiman recalls: "Nothing angered Mother more than the Story of Scheherazade. I had always though Scheherazade a brave woman who had gained her freedom through inventing tales and often, in moments of great fear, recalled her example." But his mother tells him he should find himself another model. "Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death."

He says of his feelings for his mother: "There was anger, there was pity, even the dark warm embrace of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love."

In the final 17 pages of the 245-page novel there is an abrupt change of tempo. Up to this point the narrative has been "real time" with events happening moment by moment. In the final section the adult Suleiman, now 24, reflects on his life in Egypt since his parents sent him there 15 years earlier. The longing he still feels for his country is not a narrow nationalism. "Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded."

On the surface he has adapted well to living in exile, but "Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark searching for a match to strike."

Suleiman also discloses what has happened to his parents and the people he knew in Tripoli. Those who stayed on in Libya have had to make some kind of accommodation with the regime to survive. Suleiman does not condemn them but views them with understanding. Matar says: "I think this is the best thing that literature can do, make us understand people that seem on the face of it very different from us."

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Before its publication in Britain, "In the Country of Men" was compared by its publisher Viking to "The Kite Runner", the best-selling novel by the Afghan-American medical doctor Khaled Hosseini. "The Kite Runner" has sold more than 3 million copies worldwide and is now being made into a film by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks studio. In 2005 it was the third best-selling book in the US with sales of 1.34 million copies. Over 3 million copies have been sold worldwide.

Given the massive success of "The Kite Runner" it is easy to understand why a publisher would want to identify "the next Kite Runner". There are some similarities between Matar and Hosseini and their novels. Both are first novels by authors from countries that have been through a great deal of political turmoil, and both authors have long lived in exile, Matar in London and Hosseini in California.

Hossein's novel has been described as the first novel by an Afghan written in English, and Matar's novel is said to be first novel by a Libyan written and published in English. The narrators of both novels have distant fathers, and in both an adult first-person narrator living in exile looks back on their childhoods and on significant betrayals.

The central character of "The Kite Runner" is Amir, son of a wealthy Pathan widower in Kabul. His childhood companion and servant is Hassan, son of his father's servant Ali. Hassan is a Hazara Shi'a, persecuted by other boys.

The title of Hosseini's novel comes from the kite flying competition held every year in Kabul at the beginning of winter. Hassan is a brilliant "kite runner" who chases fallen kites to keep them as trophies. Amir is victorious in the kite flying competition in 1975, but on the same day he inflicts a first terrible betrayal on the loyal Hassan. Unable to bear this first betrayal, he inflicts a further devastating betrayal that means he never sees Hassan again.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Amir and his father manage to escape in 1980 to the US where Amir eventually becomes a novelist. Then in 2001 Amir is given the opportunity to return to Afghanistan, and to try to redeem himself for his betrayal of his childhood friend.

Hosseini is an engaging writer, but more of conventional, traditional storyteller than Matar, with his characters more recognisably "good" and "evil". Matar draws his characters in more varied shades of colour. There is a more obvious quest for redemption in "The Kite Runner" than there is in "In the Country of Men"

Matar, who wrote poetry for a long time before embarking on fiction writing, is keen to explore language and push its boundaries. He writes a more suggestive prose, whereas Hossein has a habit of explaining too much to the reader and of repeating the messages of the narrative. The narrative of "The Kite Runner" depends on a number of far-fetched coincidences, and it is over-sentimental. But it is a powerful book, and is probably destined for further success as a film. .

Original English