Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
Muslims in the Dark
By Pankaj Mishra
In the Country of Men
by Hisham Matar
Dial, 246 pp., $22.00
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
by Laila Lalami
Harvest, 188 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Early in Hisham Matar's first novel, In the Country of Men, its narrator Suleiman, a nine-year-old child in Libya, describes a statue of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus in Tripoli's Martyrs' Square. The Libya-born Severus stands with one arm pointing toward the sea, as though 'urging Libya to look toward Rome.' Suleiman himself often dreams about the lands across the Mediterranean, from where his father, a businessman, brings him his most cherished gifts. However, this is 1979, and as Colonel Qaddafi ruthlessly consolidates his regime, torturing and murdering thousands of dissenters, Libya appears to have moved far from its cosmopolitan past.
Review, 4012 words
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