I have a New York Times Book Review piece out today on the new Hisham Matar novel, My Friends. It’s centrally about a Libyan man who attends an anti-Qaddafi protest in London in 1984 and, as a result, becomes an exile overnight:
After Khaled’s release [from the hospital], he is granted political asylum. Because he can’t be sure whether any photographs from the protest showed his face, or whether the Libyan security forces had sources in his hospital, he doesn’t know if he’s a marked man. He doesn’t know if he can safely return home. He doesn’t know if his family knows what happened to him, and — aware that, as a matter of course, his letters home are being read, and his calls being monitored — he can’t tell them, which means he can’t explain why he isn’t coming home, or enjoy the pleasure of narrating his life to those who know him best. The loneliness of forging a new life abroad is compounded, wrenchingly, by a dense fog of fear and secrecy.
Matar is one of my personal favorite living novelists, and his work on life in the long shadows of Libyan government violence, torture, and disappearance was a major reference point for me as I worked on Planes. As I worked on this review, I wondered if this made me the perfect reviewer—or the least-qualified one. Sometimes it’s harder to write about—to look productively at—the work that’s meant the most to you. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying now and then. As is often the case, writing the piece showed me new things about Matar’s work—but by the time I spotted them I was up against the deadline. Plus the word count. So, optimistically, I got a bit of it in and I’ll take the rest with me into the future. Most writing is a palimpsest of failure. Happy New Year!
The Planes hardcover and paperback designs were featured in a recent roundup, also in the NYT, on “The Fine Art of Paperback Makeover.” They interviewed John Gall, creative director at Knopf, and Linda Huang—designer of both jackets, and my friend from college—about their goals for both covers. Some similar territory from when I interviewed Linda about her design process for LitHub in 2022.
I stuck a little something in my bio note under the Matar review, in part to create a bit of pressure on myself to make it real …
Be in touch, —Peter