Why write? Hisham Matar enjoys his ‘great failure’

Talk to friends of the writer Hisham Matar, and he has many, and soon they will bring up one of his most notorious pastimes: have you ever seen the way he looks at art?

Matar has a habit, stemming from his early years in London, a period of immense sadness, of choosing a painting and spending hours with it every week. He would take lunch breaks at the National Gallery Velázquez, Duccioor the Lorenzetti brothers, holding on to the same work of art for months until he felt it was time to move on. And even though most of his friends admit that they can’t match Matar’s sustained attention in a gallery – one confessed that his patience runs out after 15 minutes – they agree that this ability to see is essential to his character and is central to everything from the way he walks. through a city to the books he writes.

If you look at a work of art with him and compare the impressions later, as another said, it is as if only Matar saw it in color.

“He has a way of changing the atmosphere you are in,” said Gini Alhadeff, a writer and translator, “as if time stops and you can see everything.”

Matar is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography: ‘The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between”, a double lament for his homeland, Libya, and his father, a critic of Muammar el-Qaddafi whose exact fate remains unknown. But he started out as a fiction writer, with two austere, elegiac novels about boys in the shadows of absent fathers; his debut, “In the Country of Men,” was nominated for the Booker. His new novel ‘My Friends’, his first in 13 years, is his return to form.

The book, which Random House published on Tuesday, follows three Libyan exiles in London and their decades-long friendships. Khaled, a studious man from Benghazi, anchors the story, along with Mustafa, whom he meets at university in Scotland, and Hosam, an enigmatic writer. The story follows them through the Arab Spring, through Gaddafi’s overthrow and towards the promise of a new political future in Libya.

The novel is based on themes that Matar has been exploring for years – loneliness, deracination, the totality of grief – but is also his most substantive exploration of friendship. The subject fascinates him and has profoundly shaped his world, as someone who has lived apart from his family since the age of fifteen.

“Relationships make us come alive,” Matar, 53, said during an interview from his studio in London. But while familial and romantic bonds are full of expectations, he continued, friendship is all the more exciting for its promiscuity: “We usually have more than one. We usually have them at the same time. And if we’re lucky, these can be our longest relationships.”

Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents. His father, Jaballa Matar, worked for Libya’s permanent mission to the United Nations at the time. Three years later, the Matars moved back to Libya, but left for Cairo in 1979 after it became clear that it was unsafe to remain under the autocracy of Gaddafi, who came to power in 1969. It would be more than three decades before Matar returned.

In Cairo the family led a cautious but lively life, hosting elaborate dinners that often led to spirited political and literary discussions. Jaballa continued his resistance efforts from Egypt and helped lead an opposition cell based for a time in Chad. He traveled under an assumed name, knowing he was being watched by the regime. When Matar left for an English boarding school in his mid-teens, he enrolled under the name Robert.

In 1990, the Matars’ worst nightmare became reality. Jaballa was detained by Egyptian police and taken to Libya, where he was imprisoned in Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli, the site of a 1996 massacre that claimed some 1,200 lives and countless other horrors. Matar and his family never received a clear answer about what happened to Jaballa, or even his remains, despite an international campaign and several conversations with one of Gaddafi’s sons, Seif al-Islam el-Gaddafi.

“I envy the finality of funerals,” Matar writes in “The Return.” “I long for certainty. What it must be like to wrap your hands around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to stroke the piece of earth and sing a prayer.”

In conversation, Matar is thoughtful and quick to laugh, with a wide range of allusions at hand: Ingmar Bergman, Marcel Proust, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani.

“You can spend a lot of time with Hisham,” noted the novelist Peter Carey, “and only occasionally think of the wound he carries: the loss of his country, the loss of a parent, all the pain he has gone through .’

London has been Matar’s home for more than thirty years, although he usually teaches one semester a year at Barnard College. His wife, Diana Matar, is a photographer, and the couple often creates work at the same time. Sharing “the life of the mind and the life of the heart” with her, as he described it, has enriched his existence immeasurably.

“Families are ingenious at teaching us to love,” Matar said. Friendship, on the other hand, is even more remarkable because “it involves you in someone else’s life” in a way that is not at all fatalistic. “It has nothing to do with blood.”

The book that became “My Friends” began more than a decade ago as a short story about three men who met in a cafe in London. The characters stayed with him; he noticed something while riding the bus that he thought one of the men would like, or snippets of dialogue coming to him in their voices.

‘My Friends’ is told during a walk that one of the characters, Khaled, takes through London in 2016. As he traverses the city, the story unfolds in a loose, discursive manner, with Khaled looking back on his early years in Benghazi. , where he first encountered Hosam’s writing; the life he built in Britain; and his warring instincts, especially when it comes to home. The heady optimism throughout Libya in the aftermath of the revolution has disappeared, and the three friends, now middle-aged, have chosen very different lives in the aftermath.

The story is based on several true events after the Arab Spring. An anti-Gaddafi demonstration in London in 1984 is the crucial moment: Khaled and Mustafa are injured in the protest, which ends fatally, and their involvement rules out the immediate possibility of going home.

Matar worked on “My Friends” intermittently over the years and had “that feeling when you get to the party and you read the invitation wrong — you came too early,” he said. “Time had to pass between me, or the moment I wrote the book, and some of the events that consumed the book. I had to cultivate a certain distance, ambivalence or active doubt.”

His nonfiction detours, in the wake of the Arab Spring, helped him prepare for the novel. ‘The Return’ is based on hours of testimonies from former political prisoners, including several members of his family, that he collected in the aftermath of the revolution in Libya. The book that followed, ‘A Month in Siena’, chronicled his time in Italy and studied many of the artists who ignited him during his early years in London.

“One of the things I’m interested in is how human consciousness is constantly modulating, traversing and trying to measure the distance between documentable facts and the firmament of our interiority,” Matar said. “For me, that distance is really where literature is: the untranslatable, the unspeakable.”

In ‘My Friends’, Khaled enrolls at Edinburgh University and meets a professor who changes his life. During a lecture on Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam AHH”, a lament for his friend, the professor points to two “untranslatable experiences” in the work. “The first is friendship, which, like all friendships, you cannot fully describe to anyone else. The second is grief, which, like all forms of grief, is terrible precisely because of its incommunicability.”

The lecture could function as a prelude to Matar’s own work. “If I had to point out the crowning reason, the intellectually interesting, crowning reason why I like to write or why language is my profession for me,” he said, “it has to do precisely with the fact that it is always tied to failure .

“But it’s such a tremendous failure.”