In the Country of Men

From AwardAnnals

Book:	In the Country of Men: A Novel
Author:	Hisham Matar
Honors:	2007 NBCC–Fiction finalist 2006 Booker shortlist Score: 12.57
Genres:	Fiction books
Publisher:	The Dial Press

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.

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Reviews

Barnes and Noble

Matar’s debut is the moving story of nine-year-old Suleiman, a resident of Qaddafi’s Libya in the late 1970s. Suleiman’s father has a problem: His name is on a list of people the Revolutionary Committee wants to interrogate. But when he is supposedly away on business, Suleiman sees him in town, albeit disguised. Shortly thereafter, Suleiman’s mother collects all of his father’s books for burning, their next-door neighbor is abducted and interrogated on TV, and a stranger sits in a parked car, watching Suleiman’s house.

The uncertainty of Suleiman’s world is most acute in his relationship with his mother and the toll her mysterious “illness” takes on her. Her behavior is unpredictable—one minute she’s asleep in her room, the next, she’s animated and whispers dark secrets to her only son. Such instability affects Suleiman in disturbing ways, and he finds himself capable of a shocking level of cruelty and betrayal.

Matar’s writing is succinct, filled with the incongruous details a child would notice, and describes horrific events with an innocent’s lack of judgment. In the Country of Men, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is stunningly claustrophic: a novel that captures the overwhelming feelings of a lonely, vulnerable child yet is filled with a rare vision of a troubled time and country.