Meditative ... It’s gratifying to see this thoughtful writer take all the time he needs to wrestle until daybreak with the mysterious angel of his disquieted conscience ... Matar writes with cool solemnity in phrases that are often epigraphic but never contrived ... Sorrowful as this novel often is, it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy nor an elegy.
[Matar] has written that absence is not empty but 'a busy place, vocal and insistent.' His work speaks eloquently of this loud absence and its unstopped complexities ... Matar’s most touching and provoking creation: out of time, but of our time.
Amid this refined climate of melancholy acceptance arrives the unexpected revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, whose tensions and excitements My Friends captures as well as any novel I have read ... Matar weighs these complexities with tremendous sensitivity, and My Friends is not only indispensable for a full understanding of Libyan émigrés but is, more generally, a great novel of exile.
Ambitious and poignant ... The prose is more supple than in Matar’s previous novels, allowing the narration to slide, like adult consciousness, between decades and eras, between appreciation and resignation ... A masterly literary meditation on his lifelong themes. For those who already know his work, the effect is amplified tenfold. In the dark house Matar continues to explore, the rooms are full of echoes: The further in you go, the louder they get.
Written in remarkably beautiful, calm and spacious prose. Matar’s use of English (which he did not grow up speaking) gives him rare distance and restraint.
Resisting an obviously redemptive arc, it’s a muted, moving accounting of the things that make and moor a life, and the precious meanings created with those dearest to us.
The problem with reading a book like Hisham Matar’s powerful new novel My Friends in the first week of January is that it sets the bar incredibly high for the year of reading to come. It is, quite simply, dazzling (and, by the same token, dazzlingly quite simple) ... Feels like a personal, deeply felt work.
Delicate, intellectually and emotionally ... The book is artfully paced. Long, mellifluous, meditative sentences are punctuated by short ones of bell-like clarity.
Totally absorbing ... As always, Matar’s writing is elegant and metaphorically rich, filled with carefully drawn portraits of Khaled and his intelligent, highly articulate friends and dramatic renderings of their intense conversations. Above all, there is the force of powerful emotions: outrage, grief, love. My Friends is a major literary accomplishment.
Haunted ... Hisham Matar in writing My Friends does possess that ability, the articulateness, to convey how it feels to be Khaled, to lose all control, and to enact a life that was not meant to be his.
Significantly more than the subject it purports to be about. The novel meanders through the intricacies of the ever-restless minds of its characters, and allows the reader to consider the nature and precariousness of our existence, with all its frailties and uncertainties, its sublimities and dreaminess, from multiple angles, using the saga of Libya as a springboard for these reflections.
This scintillating novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author is filled with equal parts history and fiction ... Flows quickly and vividly ... Readers are sure to be touched, coming to a deeper understanding of friendship, nation and home.
Matar contemplates friendship from many angles, as you’d expect from something called My Friends. But the title sells the novel short. This is a book about love and family, liberty and revolution, and dreams, in both senses of the word. It relays the fragility of existence and the 'infidelities of translation.' It captures the urgency and poignancy of life’s key moments...It conveys the miraculous charm of young children ... My Friends is not just a work of postcolonial literature, but a work about postcolonial literature as well.
A sophisticated work that skillfully explores themes of human connection, exile, and return at the scale of both intimate relationships and world-altering historical events ... Shattering ... Thoughtful.
