Sat, Nov 15, 2025
In the Country of Men
A child’s‑eye portrait of life in the late 1970s in Libya.
Childhood in the Country of Men
Suleiman is nine years old, on summer holiday in late‑1970s Tripoli, playing with friends and eating mulberries. Then, in a market, he spots his father, supposedly away on business, hiding behind dark glasses. From that moment the fragile safety of his world begins to fracture. The regime’s men seize a neighbor’s father; later, his interrogation and execution are broadcast on state television. Particularly gut‑wrenching is the crowd’s response, the cheering and the chants for his death - a chilling echo of real events in Libya at the time. Suleiman’s life fills with uncertainty: the family’s phone seems tapped; strangers ransack the house in search of his father; afterward his mother burns the books his father loves. Soon, his father disappears.
Told through a child’s eyes, the novel lets fear and suspicion seep in by implication; we, like Suleiman, are left to decipher what adults will not say.
Suleiman’s loyalties twist under pressure. He no longer knows whom to trust, or even whether his father might be a traitor. His mother is often “ill,” especially when his father travels, numbing herself with her “medicine.” What stayed with me most is Suleiman’s hunger for his father’s attention, the way a single shared act can feel like salvation. After his father returns from torture, he asks Suleiman to climb to the roof. Suleiman thinks:
“Life could have spent itself while we climbed those stairs, and I wouldn’t have minded.”
This is not a story that offers closure. Suleiman is sent to Cairo; he never sees his father again. Yet the book’s power lies less in plot than in perspective: it shows how a dictatorship colonizes a family’s private life, how silence, fear, and love must coexist in the same small rooms. Quietly devastating, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar is a political novel made unforgettable for me by a child’s longing.
With Libyan voices being so underrepresented in English, this book feels especially valuable: it opens a window into a particular moment in the country’s history.