January 2024, St. James Square, London. Hisham Matar points to number 5, where the Libyan embassy once sat, but there is no question of getting too close. Superstition? Delicacy towards the eleven wounded who fell under the bullets of the machine guns of three agents of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi? Not to mention the young police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, who died that day… It was April 17, 1984, the Libyan authorities bloodily repressed a demonstration by exiles demanding democracy.
The Anglo-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar was not present, of course. He was then 13 years old and living in Cairo, with his father, Jaballa Matar, a fierce opponent of the regime, but some of the injured were close friends of his family and the event lastingly shook the Libyan community. Today he makes it the climax of his superb novel, My friends488 pages with an impeccable structure and a style of supreme elegance, which recount the strength of friendship, the harshness of exile, the imponderables of destiny and the agony of a country which, from the dictatorship of Gaddafi (1969-2011) in the chaos of the post-Arab Spring, will have known only violence and corruption.
Uncommon fact, My friends was published simultaneously in France and in Anglo-Saxon countries. And everything happened very quickly. While we find Hisham, the most prestigious titles – the New York Times, THE Financial Times, The Bookseller, The Guardian, etc. – have already praised him, and his colleagues, Colm Toibin, Claire Messud, Elif Shafak, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Priscilla Morris were quick to salute his great art. A justified harvest for the author of The land that separates them, Pulitzer Prize 2017, moving story-investigation of his return to Libya in 2012 (after twenty-six years of London exile) in the footsteps of his father, kidnapped in 1990 by the secret services in Cairo Then incarcerated in Tripoli in the Abou Salim prison and disappeared since then… “I was 19 years old, Hisham tells us, the age at which one generally rebels against his father, but how can one oppose a missing person? Also, am -I became an adult very quickly, today, my father is no longer in front of me but next to me.” His ghost too, which we see appear in My friends in the guise of a protector…
This novel about the friendship between three men against the backdrop of revolution, Hisham Matar matured for a very long time, from 2002-2003, during a long stay in Paris with his wife, an American photographer, while he was refining his first fiction, In the land of men, finalist for the 2007 Booker Prize. Hence, perhaps, the impressive serenity of this trained architect who knows, without any boasting, to have constructed a robust fiction with its back and forth in time, its solid political foundation and its ballet of emotions.
Khaled, the narrator, son of a headmaster (and “clandestine historian”), from Benghazi arrived at the University of Edinburgh in 1983. Coached by his friend Mustafa, he goes to London to participate, without much conviction, at the famous demonstration. Here he is badly injured in the chest. Intensive care, life change. The young Middle Easterner now lives in fear, fear of the Libyan snitches who abound in England, then home of the Arab intelligentsia in exile, fear of seeing his parents persecuted by the regime – so he sends them false news (the mail is open) and reassuring.
In 1995, while accompanying a friend, a Lebanese architect, who was going to have heart surgery in Paris, he came across Hossam Zowa, an enigmatic writer, about whom he heard a story in 1980 on BBC News Arabic. . He will be the third friend, after the usual mistrust between refugees. The years go by, romantic adventures follow one another, Khaled feels less and less Arab and more and more English. Spring 2011 arrives. Against all odds, Mustafa and Hossam join the revolutionaries of February 17, while “Khaled the Reluctant” procrastinates. And it is on television that he will see his friends chasing Gaddafi in Sirte. At 54, Hisham Mafar would have adopted Aristotle’s precept, “The wise man pursues the absence of pain and not pleasure.” ? The author’s response, with a big smile: “I’m trying, it’s a work in progress”. A work in progress that seems well advanced.
My friends, by Hisham Matar, trans. from English by David Fauquemberg. Gallimard, 496 p., €23.50.
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