My Friends by Hisham Matar

Let’s start with the cover of this 2024 National Book Award finalist which was longlisted for both the Booker Prize and The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, named Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Time, NPR, and BookPage, and winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The National Book Critics Circle Award. The cover of the My Friends edition I purchased from Amazon depicts a solitary figure viewed from behind, with large and small lines running through its head and upper body. This cover, I believe, beautifully reflects the themes of the novel: the back of the head emphasizing the fact that the protagonist (Khaled) is exiled and can’t fully “reveal himself;” the solitary figure capturing the theme of separateness and the introspection of the narrator; the lines represent his fragmented identity and the memories of traumas experienced. I have seen an alternate cover, but my praise goes out for this one in the way it represents the artistry and emotional resonance of the novel.

The minute I started reading the novel’s narrative, I felt like the confidante of the speaker, and I love that! He discloses that he has just said goodbye to an old friend, one he has known for two decades. But instead of leaving, he is monitoring his friend as he walks across the concourse of King’s Cross Station. The narrator states:

It is, of course, impossible to be certain of what is contained in anyone’s chest, least of all one’s own or those we know well, perhaps especially those we know best, but, as I stand here on the upper level of King’s Cross Station, from where I can monitor my old friend Hosam Zowa walking across the concourse, I feel I am seeing right into him, perceiving him more accurately than ever before, as though all along, during the two decades that we have known one another, our friendship has been a study and now, ironically just after we have bid one another farewell, his portrait is finally coming into view. And perhaps this is the natural way of things, that when a friendship comes to an inexplicable end or wanes or simply dissolves into nothing, the change we experience at that moment seems inevitable, a destiny that was all along approaching, like someone walking toward us from a great distance, recognizable only when it is too late to turn away. No one has ever been a nearer neighbor to my heart. I am convinced, as I watch him go to his train for Paris, that city where the two of us first met so long ago and in the most unlikely way, that he is carrying, right where the rib cages meet, an invisible burden, one, I believe, I can discern from this distance. [p. 3]

The speaker is a Libyan exile named Khaled Abd al Hady, who left Benghazi in 1983 for Edinburgh University, and who, because of a choice he made while a student, has lived in London for thirty-two years. On the evening of November 18, 2016, after saying goodbye to his friend at the station, he begins a circuitous walk home. This walk structures the narrative and concludes only when the novel does. It leads him from St. Pancras to the Regent’s Park Central Mosque, from there to Soho, from Soho to St. James’s Square, and finally to Shepherd’s Bush, where he has lived in the same small, rented flat for the entirety of his London life.

When he reaches St. James Square, we learn that in 1984, in that very place, Khaled made the critical decision to demonstrate against the Libyan regime of Muammar el-Qaddafi along with a fellow Edinburgh student named Mustafa al Touny. The story of their relationship revolves around the choice Khaled and Mustafa made that fateful day. While not with him during the demonstration, it is Zowa’s short story “Man Being Eaten Alive by a Cat,” read on the radio, that served as another catalyst in his life and influenced his decision to leave home to pursue his studies at the University of Edinburgh.

The author has said of his novel: The first idea was to write a book about friendship, particularly male friendship, and I wanted the human events to be central, but I wanted them to be subjected to history, to politics, to different desires of intimacy, the tension between feeling at home in a friendship but at the same time trust being contingent because of the situation. And also questions of competitiveness. I think on some level my work is fascinated by masculinity. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a man for a long time. These are some of the things that have been accompanying me. [Electric Lit]

As we see in the novel’s first line, the author uses the chest to represent the inaccessible, unknowable inner world of a person. It is a powerful metaphor for the ultimate mystery of human intimacy, suggesting that no matter how close you are to someone, you can never truly know what is inside their heart and mind. This is a central preoccupation for the narrator, Khaled, throughout the novel. Matar reflects on the bewildering distance between friends: that they can be sitting next to each other, looking at the same view or painting and yet neither has a clue what is happening inside the other’s chest.

Books and writers form a thread throughout this novel. Books are physically present, like Khaled’s library or the books Hosam takes with him everywhere he goes. A list of some of them can be found at Reading Matters. One of the most encouraging parts of the novel occurs when Khaled discovers that he can walk into a public library without having to reveal his identity.

I came upon the local library and discovered that I could enter without needing to show any ID. No one asked me anything. As I did not have proof of address, I could not get a borrower’s card and therefore could read the books only at the library. This made me more adventurous, reading different authors without feeling the need to commit to them. I would remain there most of the day. I searched in different sections — history, literature, the classics — and sometimes even chose blindly. I would close my eyes and walk along one aisle with the tips of my fingers tracing the spines. Wherever I stopped, that book was my fate for at least an hour.

And this was how, under a good lamp in the corner, I tested things out. I read Seneca and felt myself to be truly in his company, as if he were a magnificent uncle chatting way beside me. His insights were so natural, so readily available, like found objects he had picked up along the way and was now taking out, one by one, and showing to me. Some stopped me cold, such as when he wrote, “No one can wear a mask for very long: for true nature will soon reassert itself.” It was because of him that I read Sophocles. I found Oedipus riveting because it is a story of a man who unwittingly destroys his past. [p. 114]

The author has shared that although he is very different from his narrator Khaled, they share the fact that London serves as a nourishing and hospitable home city for them. Matar was born in 1970 in New York City, where his father, Jaballa Matar, was working for the Libyan delegation at the United Nations. Jaballa, a former Libyan Army officer, became a proudly adamant opponent of Qaddafi’s regime. Jaballa moved his family to Egypt in 1979 and in 1986, Hisham left Egypt for boarding school in England, where he, like the narrator of “My Friends,” assumed a false identity for the sake of his safety. In 1990, while Hisham was a student in London, his father was abducted from the family apartment in Cairo and disappeared into the mouth of the Libyan security state. The family knows that Jaballa spent time in the feared Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, also known as “the Last Stop,” in the mid-nineties. Then all communication from him ceased. In 2012, Hisham returned to Libya, in the hope of finding out what happened to his father, a quest that, agonizingly, also incorporated the more tenuous hope that Jaballa was still alive. But in a nonfiction account of that journey, “The Return” (2016), he concludes that his father most probably died on June 29, 1996, one of the victims of a purge in which twelve hundred and seventy prisoners were executed.

Even though political violence is a central theme, this is a quiet novel full of notably beautiful prose that conveys what it is to be an exile, unable to return to your homeland for fear of persecution. It’s about friendship, revolution, and the power of art and writing in the face of injustice. It’s a book I love!

Check Amazon for more on this book I love.