Month: June 2024

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My Friends by Hisham Matar

I have wanted to read Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between for some time. That book is an account of the author’s search for his father who was kidnapped and disappeared in Libya when the author was 19-years-old. That book won him the Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography in 2017.

I read My Friends in the last couple of weeks and since finishing it, I learned that it has won the Orwell Foundation, 2024 Prize for Political Fiction from a shortlist of eight novels.

Alexandra Harris, who chaired the political fiction panel, said:

“My Friends is a work of grace, gentleness, beauty and intellect, offered in the face of blunt violence and tyranny. The shootings at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984 reverberate through the novel, defining the lives of young men who cannot risk returning to their families and their native country. Matar’s response to those gunshots is a richly sustained meditation on exile and friendship, love and distance, deepening with each page as layers of recollection and experience accrue.”

From Kings Cross Station to Shepherd’s Bush Green

My Friends is narrated between the time it takes our protagonist to farewell his friend Hosam Zowa at the Eurostar terminal at King’s Cross Station, to walk two hours plus, overland to the apartment he has lived in for the past 30 years at Shepherd’s Bush Green. Along the way he will pass points that elicit memories of the past from his youth to current middle age, bringing about a kind of reckoning, a healing.

By the end of the novel, he will have made a significant decision, long in the making.

These past years since 2011, since the Libyan Revolution and all that had followed it – the countless failures and missed opportunities, the kidnappings and assassinations, the civil war, entire neighbourhoods flattened, the rule of militias – changed Hosam. Evidence of this was in his posture but also his features: the soft tremble in the hands, perceptible each time he brought a cigarette to his mouth, the doubt around his eyes, the cautious climate in them, and a face like a landscape liable to bad weather.

The novel in a sense starts at the end, with the brief reunion and subsequent farewell of these two friends, as Hosam returns to London after spending the last five years in Libya and is en route to Paris and a new life in San Francisco.

This goodbye is the catalyst to Khaled’s long walk and reflection on the past thirty years of a compromised life that have lead to this moment.

One Fateful Decision

Young Libyan students living in exile in London afraid to return home, survive through the tenuous bonds of friendship

This was so good. Not just well written and an addictive page-turner, but an acute exploration of the effect on a young man of this one event. That event becomes a turning point in his life, keeping him away from his country and family. The longer that situation and his fear of it remains, the more it changes who he is and will become, preventing him from returning, even when he can.

Khaled is the son of a school teacher from Benghazi, Libya and when he is 18, he starts an English Literature degree at Edinburgh university on a government scholarship (having refused to find an influential relation to help the application along).

His family are proud, but his father is also cautious and has one pertinent but emphatic piece of advice for his son.

Bidding me farewell at the airport, my father held me not in his usual easy embrace but in one more constricted.

‘Don’t be lured in,’ he said, the words emanating from his very core.
‘I won’t,’ I said, assuming he meant the usual temptations that might lure a teenager.
He held my hand tightly, squeezing it harder than he had ever done before. The force frightened me. It made it seem as though I were in danger of falling. The pupils of his eyes turned small and dark and slowly, in a barely audible tone, he said,

‘Don’t. Be. Lured. In.’

A Perception of Freedom

Despite the warning, Khaled gives in easily to pressure from his friend, fellow student Mustafa, to go on a quick trip to London to attend a demonstration against the regime of Gaddafi, outside the Libyan embassy.

When government officials fire from the windows at protestors, the two boys are wounded, their lives forever changed.

Exiled.

This aspect of the novel is based on a real incident that happened on 17 April 1984 resulting in the death of 25-year-old policewoman PC Yvonne Fletcher and the injury of 11 of the 70 demonstrators.

Living in Fear

Khaled is one of the worst wounded, and spends a week or so in hospital. From the moment he awakens, he lives in fear of being associated with what has happened, of being recognised. He lives in fear for his family, of repercussions and so begins a life of suppression.

He will never speak of what happened, he will never share exactly his whereabouts or what he is doing. He lives his life in a void ahead of the stories he tells. His family think he continues to study in Edinburgh. Every conversation he has, he speaks as though someone is listening. Because they are.

The Student, The Professor, The Writer

Thanks to a connection made with Professor Walbrook who had shown an interest in him, he will eventually resume his education in London and become a teacher.

‘Tell me about your life back in Libya. I’m afraid I know very little about your country.’

‘I grew up in the same Ottoman house where I was born, in Benghazi, right in the heart of the old downtown, very close to the seafront. The house belonged to my paternal grandfather and to his father before him. Each, including my father, was born there.

In London, he will lead a low profile existence and relationships are not easy to navigate due to how much of himself he becomes adept at holding back. His friendship with Mustafa is important because of their shared history and the rupture that skewered their life trajectory. For five months after the shooting he lost touch with him, then they re-connect, Mustafa carrying the guilt of the one who influenced the other.

What I wish I could have told him then is that at that moment I believed no one in the entire world knew me better than he did. That with him I did not have to pretend. I did not have to shield myself from his concern or bewilderment. I did not have to translate. And violence demands translation. I will never have the words to explain what it is like to be shot, to lose the ability to return home or to give up on everything I expected my life to be, or why it felt as though I had died that day in St Jame’s Square and, through some grotesque accident, been reborn into the hapless shoes of an eighteen-year-old castaway, stranded in a foreign city where he knew no one and could be of little use to himself, that all he could just abut manage was to march through each day, from beginning to end, and then do it again. I did not know how to say things then, I still do not, and the inarticulacy filled my mouth. This, I now know, is what is meant by grief, a word that sounds like something stolen, picked out of your pocket when you least expect it.

A Short Story on BBC Radio

The friendship that develops with Hosam Zowa, one we are aware of from the opening pages, reappears over half way through the novel. The origins of this friendship trace back to three years before departing for Scotland.

Khaled and his family were at home listening to BBC Radio Arabic (an 85 year old broadcasting service terminated in 2023). A well known presenter interrupted the news broadcast to read a short story by a man named Hosam, a writer whose debut novel would become a salve to Khaled and Mustafa, after what happened to them in London.

It was certainly the point in time after which nothing was the same again, not for him and, although I did not know it then, not for me either.

Not long after that story was read over the airwaves, the presenter was assassinated. The writer would go into hiding.

We had met in 1995, when he was thirty-five and I was twenty-nine, and, even though we have known each other for twenty-one years, it surprised me when I heard him whisper, ‘My only true friend,’ speaking the words rapidly and with deep feeling, as though it were a reluctant admission, as if at that moment and against the common laws of discourse speech had preceded thought and he was, very much like I was, comprehending those words for the very first time, and, perhaps, also like I was, noticing the at once joyous and sorrowful wake they left behind, not only because they had arrived at the point of our farewell, but also because of how they made even more regrettable that illusive character of our friendship, one marked by great affection and loyalty but also absence and suspicion, by a powerful and natural connection and yet an unfathomable silence that had always seemed, even when we were side by side, not altogether bridgeable. I do not doubt that I have been equally responsible for this gap, but nonetheless, I continue to accuse him in the privacy of my thoughts, believing that a part of him had chosen to remain aloof. I could perceive his remoteness even in the most boisterous of times.

A Personal, Political Promenade

Over the course of his walk, the novel unfolds and Khaled reflects on how he has been in these various relationships, the safe spaces he has created for himself, a small inconsequential apartment, a girlfriend that makes no demands of him, a teaching role that he can disappear into and those two friendships that remind him who he is.

His friends however make a decision to leave and Khaled will hesitate, witnessing from afar what is happening in his home country, a place changed from that which he and his father and ancestors knew. A country in the full throes of a revolution that will play out in the public domain.

A brilliant accomplishment, navigating the alternate life of a young man in exile, witness to a unique period in history, and the things that help someone like him survive in a place that provides refuge while never quite belonging.

Highly Recommended.

Hisham Matar, Author

Hisham Matar was born in New York to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His memoir The Return was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of the novels In The Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Anatomy of a Disappearance.

Matar is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.

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Orbital by Samantha Harvey

A Long Perspective of Earth

nature writing from space and an unexpected and profound love letter to life on Earth

Six astronauts from six countries are in a spacecraft at the International Space Station that orbits Earth two hundred and fifty miles from the edge of the planet.

We spend one day, or 16 orbits with them and find out how it is to be living on the job, while falling, though it seems like floating.

We learn about what they are doing, how they are a team and yet not, how much more difficult (or less relevant) it is to obey political allegiances when you are in orbit and look back at Earth and see her for what she really is.

Orbit 1, ascending

One of the astronauts Chie receives a message that her mother has passed away, which makes her feel emotions and reflect in ways that are not typical of the kind of human selected to spend months in space.

Since that news, they find themselves looking down at earth as they circle their way around it (meanderingly it seems, though that couldn’t be less true), and there’s that word: mother mother mother mother. Chie’s only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year. Chie has been made an orphan, her father dead a decade. That ball is the only thing she can point to now that has given her life. There’s no life without it. Without that planet there’s no life. Obvious.

hurricane circling earth weather pattern seen from outer space
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

A typhoon warning has been sent and the astronauts track its weather patterned behaviour from afar.

Roman is on his eighty eighth day of this mission. He keeps a tally of the days, to tether himself to something countable, otherwise the centre drifts.

…in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights.

Each orbit passes a different continent, a different part of the ocean.

By day it is as if the Earth is uninhabited, at night, the impact of humanity is more apparent.

Separate or One

The astronauts are supposed to represent different countries and demarcations, but up there the lines are less obvious.

They have talked before about a feeling they often have, a feeling of merging. That they are not quite distinct from one another, nor from the spaceship. Whatever they were before they came here, whatever their differences in training or background, in motive or character, whatever country they hail from and however their nations clash, they are equalised here by the delicate might of their spaceship. They are a choreographing of movements and functions of the ship’s body as it enacts its perfect choreography of the planet.

A rocketship to the moon is about to be launched, these astronauts will travel much further, in a different direction, with a different purpose.

The Problem of Dissonance

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

At first they are enamoured by the night views, the twinkly lights of habitation and the surface dazzle of man-made things.

That soon changes as the senses broaden and deepen and it is the daytime earth they come to love, the humanless simplicity of land and sea, the way the planet seems to breathe, to show itself, clearly.

So then come discrepancies and gaps. They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair.

The Mystery of Las Meninas

A story told in 16 orbits that reflects on man’s inclination to explore the outer frontiers and asks why, how it might affect humanity, if at all. And ponders who is the real subject of Velazquez’s painting, Las Meninas? Above all, it is a nostalgic glance back at what we have that we don’t always seem to see.

It is an interesting and thought provoking read that brings about a single point of focus – the earth. I discovered I am very much a happily earth bound creature. The idea of space or floating in an orbiting capsule holds very little intrigue, except indeed, to further appreciate all that the Earth offers us in terms of her own nature.

Further Reading

The Guardian: Orbital by Samantha Harvey review – the astronaut’s view

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Women’s Prize Fiction & Nonfiction Winners 2024

The 29th winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction has been announced from the shortlist of six novels and on the same evening the inaugural winner of the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction from the shortlist of six books.

2024 Fiction Winner

The Women’s Prize for Fiction was won by American author, V. V. Ganeshananthan, for her deeply moving, powerful second novel, Brotherless Night (my review), which depicts a family fractured by the Sri Lankan civil war.

‘Brotherless Night is a brilliant, compelling and deeply moving novel that bears witness to the intimate and epic-scale tragedies of the Sri Lankan civil war. In rich, evocative prose, Ganeshananthan creates a vivid sense of time and place and an indelible cast of characters. Her commitment to complexity and clear-eyed moral scrutiny combines with spellbinding storytelling to render Brotherless Night a masterpiece of historical fiction.’ Monica Ali, CHAIR OF JUDGES FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION

2024 NonFiction Winner

The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to Canadian bestselling writer, global activist and film-maker, Naomi Klein, for Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World; her urgent, illuminating examination of our polarised society.

‘This brilliant and layered analysis demonstrates humour, insight and expertise. Klein’s writing is both deeply personal and impressively expansive. Doppelganger is a courageous, humane and optimistic call-to-arms that moves us beyond black and white, beyond Right and Left, inviting us instead to embrace the spaces in between.’ Professor Suzzanah Lipscomb, CHAIR OF JUDGES FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

Further Reading

The Guardian Article: Judges praised Klein’s Doppelganger for its ‘courageous’ study of truth in politics and called Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night a ‘masterpiece’ of historical fiction by Lucy Knight

Have you read either of these books? Let us know what you thought of them in the comments below.

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Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan

I became aware of Brotherless Night when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, the winner of which will be announced at 6.45pm GMT on June 13th, 2024.

When I read that it was about a young woman in Sri Lanka, in the time of approaching civil war, I recalled reading Nayomi Munaweera’s excellent Island of a Thousand Mirrors (my review here), a book about families and divisions, as well as belonging – how human beings continue to perpetuate separation and difference and make it dangerous, fearful and forbidden to pursue union and friendship, due to backgrounds and ethnic differences. Two families from different ethnic origins, living up and downstairs from each other…and so the story will unfold, as another generation is compromised.

Long simmering ethnic tensions and perceptions of injustice against the government lead to a civil war that pitted one group of people against the other, Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamil.

A Family and A Country Set to Lose

Sri Lanka civil war 1981 -1989 a sister who wants to become a doctor, four brother, Tamil militant recruiters, governments using ethnic differences to punish

Brotherless Night is narrated from the perspective of Sashi, from 1981-1989, the long, tumultuous, violent years of the civil war, fought between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Tamil separatist groups (bookended by chapters set in New York 2009).

It is mainly set in the city of Jaffna, where the young protagonist of a Tamil family lives, with some chapters set in the capital Colombo.

At sixteen, Sashi wants to become a doctor like her older brother. She has four brothers, all with different ambitions, three older and one younger. Their father Appa, a government surveyor, is travelling and rarely at home unless given leave.

The story opens when one of their friends K, hears Sashi’s screams as she spills hot water on herself and drops his bicycle and comes inside and tends to her burn. He is in her third brother Seelan’s class, also destined for medical school. His life will take a different direction, becoming further entwined with hers and her brothers.

Awakening to Irreparable Adult Conflict

The novel traces the beginnings of their pursuit of their dreams and the slow unravelling as the country erupts and young Tamil men are both recruited and sometimes snatched to join “the cause”.

A book sat on her brother’s shelf, an old bestseller about the 1958 anti-Tamil riots, one he read after being present at an international conference on Tamil language and culture where police had fired into the audience.

At sixteen I still hadn’t touched Emergency ’58 but I knew it was a brutal testimony to Sri Lanka’s willingness to slaughter its own Tamil citizens. My father’s slim, battered copy of the book had taken on the aura of something forbidden and terrifying. Did I need to read it to know that because we were ethnic minorities, Tamils were considered expendable?

It follows the effect on this particular family of the different choices people make, including the absent father and the daring mother. When two of the brothers join one of the militant groups, Sashi’s mother does everything to try and save the youngest son from becoming lost to them. When disaster arrives, she rallies ‘the mothers’ in one unforgettable episode that does make a difference, but won’t save them from what is coming.

The boys are challenged by their mother on a rare visit home, but are unable to provide responses to her unanswerable questions.

The Twisted Turns of Stunted Dreams

It is about the disruption of the dreams and the way they can swerve when disasters occur; about the effect on families and youth of political ideologies and both the difficulty and dangers of resisting; the futility of judgement, of regret.

I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?”

How to Survive

Perhaps education is one of the few ways that youth can escape a world in turmoil, but even that is no guarantee. So many have little choice or are made to choose between life and death, no choice at all.

Stories that involve families, their experiences, their losses, their small wins, their deep hurts, their bravery and failures perhaps tell us more than what media news stories depict, where money, power and political influence dictate. The lives of families, of mothers and sons and daughters come from the heart, from a desire to want them to survive and thrive.

Thoroughly researched and humanely presented, while not holding back from expressing its fury, this novel will make many readers grateful for the simplicity of their own lives and realise the ease with which they are able to pursue it and the banality of our own carefree decision-making, compared to the complicated conflict too many today are born into.

Highly Recommended.

“I was interested in writing about the gray space between militarized societies and questions of choice and coercion,” V.V. Ganeshananthan, in an interview with Here & Now‘s Deepa Fernandes

Further Reading

wbur Interview: ‘Brotherless Night’ explores Sri Lanka’s civil war through stories of family by Deepa Fernandes

NPR: ‘Brotherless Night,’ an ambitious novel about Sri Lankan civil war, wins $150K Carol Shields prize

The Guardian: Brotherless Night by V.V Ganeshananthan review – heartbreak in war-torn Sri Lanka by Yagnishsing Dawoor – excerpt below.

The novel has the intimacy of a memoir, the urgency of reportage, and the sweep and scale of the epic. It occasionally employs the second person to address the reader. In this, it sits somewhere between plea and testimony. And while the revelations are distressing, the narration itself is buoyed up by a rare and robust emotional force. Ganeshananthan’s prose is rich, eloquent, utterly unsparing. “The war,” Sashi tells us, “offered us only tight quarters.”

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà tr. Mara Faye Lethem

Early in May, I went with my son to Barcelona to meet up with my brother who was celebrating a significant birthday.

I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a novel with me translated from Catalan, although during the four days we were there, I did not spend much time reading.

I read a few chapters before I went there and was intrigued to discover a novel of multiple voices and perspectives, not just human voices, firmly rooted in Catalonia culture.

While the first three days were in the city, I felt drawn towards the mountains and so we spent a day in nearby Montserrat.

When Lightning Strikes

Photo M.Soetebier Pexels.com

When I sing, Mountains Dance is set near a village high in the Pyrenees. It is a lyrical, mind-expanding work, littered with references to the folklore and history of Catalonia that brings alive, and gives voice to, every aspect of life within its unique biosphere.

The first chapter is entitled Lightning and I cannot be sure that it is lightning that speaks; perhaps it is the many facets of the storm that narrates. However, it is lightning that wreaks devastation and change on the community that we will then slowly be introduced to, over the following chapters.

After our arrival all was stillness and pressure, and we forced the thin air down to bedrock, then let loose the first thunderclap. Bang! A reprieve. And the coiled snails shuddered in their secluded homes, godless and without a prayer, knowing that if they didn’t drown, they would emerge redeemed to breathe the dampness in. And then we poured water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty thunderclap resounded inside the chest cavity of every beast.

Navigating Loss, Celebrating Survival

A man named Domènec, a husband and father of two children, is outside when the storm breaks. He is in the middle of rescuing a calf whose tail is caught in a jumble of wires, carrying a small load of black chanterelles (Trumpet of Death) he has foraged. In saving the life of one, nature then takes another, in an instant.

And when it was clear we were done, the birds hopped out onto branches and sang the song of survivors, their little stomachs filled with mosquitoes, yet bristling and furious with us. They had little to complain about, as we hadn’t even hailed, we’d rained just enough to kill a man and a handful of snails. We’d barely knocked down any nests and hadn’t flooded a single field.

Ghosts of the Past Acting on the Present

A Catalan novel in translation, book cover set against the mountains of Montserrat

The four women who witnessed it approached him, then left him, gathering the soaking mushrooms he had dropped, women who made unguents and elixirs and all the other wicked things that witches do.

The death of the man sets off a catalyst of consequences for those left behind, his grieving wife, his newborn son, his neighbours.

I don’t know what hurts more: thinking only of the good memories and giving in to the piercing longing that never lets up, that intoxicates the soul, or bathing in the stream of thought that lead me to sad memories, the dark and cloudy ones that choke my heart and leave me feeling even more orphaned at the thought that my husband was not that all the angel I held him up to be.

Their voices are presented individually, then as the narrative moves along, the interconnectedness of this polyphonic world becomes increasingly apparent.

A Polyphonic Narrative

Irene Solà channels the unique voices of every living (or previously living) being: the lightning bolts, roe deer, mountains, the ghosts of civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers, with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain.

The construction is non-linear, the voices fragmentary, but the threads of story rise up through the pages, like those black chanterelles from the damp forest floor.

When tragedy strikes the family a second time, the sister is forced to face life’s struggles and joys alone. A chorus of voices bears witness to all that passes, and the savage beauty of the natural environment, demonstrating aloneness as a state of human mind and not a reality.

Here, the voice of the black chanterelles:

The wild boar came, dark mouth, wet teeth, hot air, fat tongue. The boar came and ripped us out. A man came and ripped us out. The lightning came and killed the man. The women came and gathered us up. The women came and cooked us. The children came. The rabbits came. And the roe-deer. More men came and they carried baskets. Men and women came and they carried knives.

There is no grief if there is no death. There is no pain if the pain is shared. There is no pain if the pain is memory and knowledge and life. There is no pain if you’re a mushroom! Rain fell and we grew plump. The rain stopped and we grew thirsty. Hidden, out of sight, waiting for the cool night. The dry days came and we disappeared. The cool night came, and we grew. Full. Full of all the things. Full of knowledge and wisdom and spores. Spores fly like ladybugs. Spores are daughters and mothers and sisters, all at once.

Narrative Threads, Seeds, Spores, Growth and Healing

Sometimes the text reads like a story and other times like a hallucinatory dream, with a hidden message. Something of a puzzle, the various parts that make up this ecosystem, this community, the human and non-human. It is like imagining that the mountain and the trees really do bear witness to all and if they could share what they have witnessed, it would be something like this.

It requires slow reading and perseverance, as it takes a little while for the voices to become apparent and for the reader to accept that the human voices are not given the right to dominate the narrative. We are able to see and comprehend the wider picture if we have the patience to persevere.

Highly Recommended travel companion if visiting Catalonia.

Further Reading

Guardian Review: the mushroom’s tale – Animals, ghosts, humans, mountains and clouds share the narrative in this playful, deeply felt portrait of Catalonia and its people by Christopher Shrimpton

Granta: In Conversation: Eva Baltasar & Irene Solà – ‘The tide carries my books from my head to a place that is no longer mine.’ The authors discuss friendship, the sea and finishing their novels. March 2022.

Author, Irene Solà

Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, the Documenta Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize, and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery.

By interlacing art and literature, Irene Solà’s work investigates the construction, uses and possibilities of narrative and storytelling, from the historical and popular contexts to the more contemporary.