My Friends, by Hisham Matar: On the Loneliness of Exile

Hisham Matar's 2024 National Book Award-finalist novel My Friends is about making your way in the world when you can't go home again. It's about the loneliness of exile, the importance of friendship, and the horrors of authoritarianism.

Imagine your life being on pause for more than 25 years. You exist in limbo, away from your country, apart from your family, even having to lie to them, knowing your infrequent correspondence and even more infrequent conversations are monitored. Such is the fate of our narrator, Khaled, a Libyan national who arrives in Edinburgh in 1984 on a university scholarship. Young and idealistic, but also naive, Khaled becomes swept up in political currents much stronger than his ability to deal with him.

He rues the day he didn't listen more closely to his university friend, who told him when he arrived in Edinburgh: "I have resigned myself to the fact that I live in a world of unreasonable men and the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is, best we can, avoid their schemes."

So for reasons I won't spoil, Khaled becomes stuck in the UK. He can't return home because if he does, he likely won't be allowed to leave Libya again. Being trapped in an authoritarian state, though, might be the best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, he'd be murdered by the regime, as so many before him had.

So he stays in London, building a life with his friend, Mustafa, and later, a writer named Hosam Zawa, who'd been one of the inspirations for him to go to university and study literature in the first place.

When the revolution breaks out in the spring of 2011, each of these men must again weigh his priorities. Each man must take an accounting of his courage. 

The pace of this novel is deliberate and contemplative, and the tone is sober and earnest. The story is told in 108 short chapters, which gives the effect of pulling you along a little more quickly than you might read otherwise. But to me this still felt a little like homework. Yes, it's a VERY GOOD NOVEL. The reviews are universally exceptional and it's won tons of literary awards. But it felt more like something I *should* be reading, like a long New Yorker expose, than something I'd read strictly for pleasure. That said, I'm still really glad I read it. It's a stunning piece of literary fiction, and provides fascinating context and a new perspective on events on which I'd only known a little about.