Hisham Matar in Order: Fiction and Memoir, and Which Comes First
Matar has written essentially the same story twice — once as a novel and once as a memoir — and the order genuinely changes how both land. His father was abducted by the Qaddafi regime and never seen again. This path takes the fiction first, so that the memoir arrives as the fact underneath it rather than as the source it is being compared to.
Start here: the novels
BeginnerRead the fiction first, so the memoir lands as revelation rather than as explanation.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Three weeks. In the Country of Men is 253 pages and Anatomy of a Disappearance 235 — both short, both slow. Ten days each at around 25 pages a day. Read them in this order and leave a few days between them; they are close enough in material that running them together blurs the difference.
- In the Country of Men is Tripoli in 1979 seen by a nine-year-old who understands almost none of what he is watching, which is precisely what makes it unbearable to read.
- The child narrator is a technical solution, not a sentimental one. Suleiman reports the surveillance, the informing and his mother's drinking accurately and interprets all of it wrongly, so the reader assembles the real events over his head.
- The book is about what a dictatorship does inside a family: whom you can tell, what a mother does with what she knows, and the moment a child betrays someone without understanding that he has.
- The public execution broadcast on television is the novel's centre and Matar stages it as something watched at home, among neighbours. It is a real feature of Qaddafi's Libya, not an invention.
- Anatomy of a Disappearance circles the same absence from a colder distance: an older narrator, a father who vanishes, a stepmother, and a European setting rather than a Libyan one.
- The second novel is deliberately less warm and less immediate. Matar is testing whether the material works without a child's voice to carry it, and the answer is part of what this stage is for.
- What does Suleiman not understand, and at what point are you certain you understand it better than he does?
- What does his mother tell him, and why does she tell a nine-year-old?
- How does the televised execution scene work — what is Matar's decision about where the reader is standing?
- How does the cooler narration of Anatomy of a Disappearance change the same material?
- Which novel is better, and is it the same as which is more affecting?
- Keep a note of every event Suleiman reports and misreads. Reading that list at the end is the closest thing to reading the adult novel underneath the child's one.
- Mark the moment of Suleiman's betrayal and what he thinks he is doing at the time. Everything the memoir will later say about complicity and helplessness is prefigured here.
- Read the two novels' opening pages back to back once you have finished both. Same subject, two narrators, five years apart — write down what Matar changed deliberately.
- Do not read anything about Matar's own family until this stage is finished. The path depends on the memoir arriving as revelation, and a biographical note read now will spend it early.
Next up: You have the disappearance twice as fiction, which is the only position from which the memoir can land as fact rather than as source material.
Tripoli in 1979 seen by a nine-year-old who understands almost none of it, which is what makes it unbearable. Booker-shortlisted and the right first book.
The second novel, circling the same absence from a colder distance.
The memoir
IntermediateRead the account of the search for his father, with both novels behind it.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Two weeks. The Return is 272 pages and does not sustain long sittings — it circles, doubles back and stops for art and architecture. Around 20 pages a day. Read the whole of this stage before returning to the fiction.
- Matar's father, Jaballa Matar, was abducted in Cairo in 1990, handed to the Qaddafi regime and imprisoned in Abu Salim. The last confirmed letters are from 1995. What happened after that is the book's unanswerable question.
- The Return is his journey back to Libya after the 2011 revolution, at the age of forty-one, to find out. It won the Pulitzer Prize for autobiography.
- The 1996 Abu Salim massacre, in which roughly twelve hundred prisoners were killed in a single day, is the fact the book has to consider and cannot confirm as his father's fate.
- Matar refuses closure explicitly. The memoir's argument is that the absence of a body and of a date is itself the injury, and that the demand for an ending is a demand the disappeared cannot meet.
- Reading it third turns the two novels retrospectively into something closer to testimony. That reordering is the effect the whole path is built to produce.
- The digressions into painting, poetry and the history of Libya are not padding. They are what a person does with a grief that has no procedure, and the book is honest about using them that way.
- What does Matar actually establish about his father's fate, and what remains open at the end?
- How does he write about people who did survive Abu Salim, and what is his position toward their accounts?
- The memoir refuses closure. Is that a moral position, a factual necessity, or both?
- Which passages of the novels now read differently, and specifically how?
- What are the digressions into art and history doing for him — and for the book?
- Reread the first chapter of In the Country of Men immediately after finishing The Return. The father who leaves on business trips is now a documented man, and the chapter changes.
- Note every point where the memoir contradicts or corrects something you assumed from the fiction. Matar has written the same story twice on purpose and the differences are deliberate.
- Mark the passages about the 1996 massacre and read them consecutively. He returns to it repeatedly and never the same way; the repetition is the structure of not knowing.
- Write one paragraph on whether reading the fiction first was the right decision for you. The path makes a claim and this is where you test it.
Next up: With the fact underneath the fiction now known, the last book shows what Matar does with the same preoccupations once they are no longer his alone.
His return to Libya after the revolution to find out what happened to his father. It won the Pulitzer for autobiography, and reading it third turns the two novels retrospectively into something closer to testimony.
The later work
IntermediateOne more, where the preoccupations move into a different key.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Three weeks. My Friends is 440 pages, by some distance the longest book here, and it is a novel of conversation and decades rather than incident — about 25 pages a day. It suits long unhurried sittings.
- Three Libyan exiles in London across decades, beginning with the 1984 shooting outside the Libyan embassy in St James's Square, where gunfire from inside the building wounded demonstrators and killed a policewoman.
- That shooting is a real event and it is the hinge: two of the friends are shot at the protest, cannot go home afterwards, and the rest of their lives proceed from an afternoon.
- It is his most spacious book. Where the earlier work compresses around an absence, this one has room for friendship, argument, reading, marriage and thirty years of ordinary time.
- The preoccupations have moved into a different key. Exile is no longer only loss; it is also a life that was actually lived, with its own attachments and its own betrayals.
- The narrator's relation to the two friends — what he owes them, what he did not do, who went back — carries the same moral pressure as the child's betrayal in the first novel, at adult scale.
- Read fourth, it is the answer to a question the earlier books could not ask: what happens to the people who are not disappeared.
- How does the 1984 shooting determine each of the three lives, and how differently for each?
- What does the extra length allow Matar to write that the earlier books had no room for?
- One friend returns to Libya and one does not. What does the novel think of each decision?
- How does friendship function here as a subject, when the earlier books were all about fathers?
- Across all four books, what is Matar's account of exile — what it takes and what it leaves?
- Read a short account of the 1984 St James's Square shooting before starting. The novel assumes the event and gains from your knowing its outlines.
- Track the narrator's relationship to each friend separately across the decades. The novel's long span makes it easy to conflate them, and the differences are where the book lives.
- Set the final pages of My Friends beside the final pages of The Return. One ends in unresolved absence, the other in a life fully lived at a distance; write a paragraph on whether they are the same conclusion.
- Go back to the list you kept of Suleiman's misreadings. Adult knowledge is the whole difference between the first book and this one, and the list makes it concrete.
Next up: This closes the path: two novels about a disappearance, the memoir that supplies the fact beneath them, and the late novel about the exiles who survived.
Three Libyan exiles in London across decades, beginning with the 1984 shooting outside the Libyan embassy. His most spacious book.