In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

I yearned for them, my room, my workshop on the roof, Kareem. What I missed most was the smell of our house. Once, but once, when I was still a boy, I cried and screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his endless business trips. Judge Yaseen acted nobly. He simply shut the door to the room that he had given me in his house, then later sent the maidservant in which a cold glass of sugarcane juice. I buried my face into the sharp lavender smell of the pillow, mourning the familiar: digging my face into her neck, kissing his hand.

One day, young Suleiman sees his father in the middle of Tripoli's Martyrs' Square, wearing black sunglasses. Only, his father is supposed to be on a business trip. At home, his mother does what she always does when Baba is away: she drinks her "medicine" and tells Suleiman stories take from One Thousand and One Nights. The similarity between herself and Scheherazade is not lost on Suleiman's mother, trapped in an arranged marriage, stuck in a room while the man who governs her life goes about his business. But just as Suleiman must confront what that business is, so do the officials of Qaddafi's Libyan government, who begin to sniff around, having recently abducted Baba's neighbor and, as it turns out, collaborator.

What makes In the Country of Men work is not that it tells the story of Libyan resistance through the eyes of a young child; stories that ironize the upheavals of human history in just that way are too common. What I liked about it was that, in several meaningful ways, author Hisham Matar makes young Suleiman a collaborator with the regime that hunts his father. His mother burns their father's books so they won't be discovered; Suleiman, angered on his father's behalf, saves one, which happens to have an incriminating message written in it. A man named Sharief watches the house from a parked car, and Suleiman believes him when he says that he's only looking out for Baba's interests, to the point where he even divulges some of the necessary information the man is looking for. This dynamic is exacerbated by the ways that Suleiman, acting out his fear and anxiety, becomes isolated from his community, mocking his friend and son of the abducted man, as if that mockery could protect his own father. Later, he throws a rock that hits the neighborhood's most physically vulnerable child. That's Suleiman: lashing out from deep anxieties, and harming the wrong people. Part of me expected that In the Country of Men would turn out to be the story of the son of a freedom fighter who grows up to be a torturer for the regime.

It's not that kind of book, thankfully. But neither is it the mawkish or sentimental kind of book that would follow Suleiman's gradual awakening to the truth about the country in which he lives, which would lead to him growing more admiring of and closer to both father and mother. Suleiman plays his small part in the ultimate failure of his father's political work, and the sundering of his family. In the end, the regime is too strong and the family is too small, change is still too far in the future, and Qaddafi's Libya is still Qaddafi's Libya.

With the addition of Libya, my "Countries Read" list is up to 109!