Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

May 05, 2011

okyrhoe rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Sep 07, 2010

Sue rated it:

From my blog:
written by Hisham Matar and published in February 2007 by The Dial Press. This is Matar's bio as written on the end flap:

Hisham Matar was born in 1970 in New York city to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo. He lives in London and is currently at work on his second novel. In the Country of Men will be published in twenty-two languages.

This was a difficult book to read, not because of the density of the writing - dense it was not More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 29, 2011

ala' rated it:

شاعرية جدا ، رغم جوها الكئيب ، كرهت المؤلف في لحظات معينة ، لأنه استدرج براءة الاطفال إلى عالم السياسة .. مشهد اعدام رشيد كان مؤلما جدا بالنسبة لي ، و همجيا جدا .. وددت لو أعرف ليبيا واحدا لأستفسر منه عن حقيقة الأمر .. - لكن لن أستغرب ما قرأت ما دام القذافي يحكمهم - ..
أحببت شاعريتها جدا ..
أحببت نجوى جدا .. جعلتني أستحضر نجوى منيف وجبرا في عالم بلا خرائط لا أعلم لماذا ، ربما هذا الجنون العشقي - لكنها مختلفة .. هي أيضا رضيت العبودية وآثرتها على الموت ..
----
جذبتني في الكتاب مقا More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 06, 2011

Felis rated it:

...’Did you know how hard the angels worked and how they risked everything to give us mulberries?’ I said to make her better, to make her cheeck rosy again. ‘And all because they knew how hard life was going to be for us here on earth. I wish you were there with me, to taste them. You know how you say that everything we know will be more beautiful in Paradise? Well, everything except mulberries, they taste as good here, they are the angels’ way to make us patient. I think they are the only thing More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 19, 2011

yamami rated it:

تدور أحداث الرواية في ظلال الثورة الليبية لـ معمّر القذافي D :
بـ عقلٍ سئوول وعينيّ طفلٍ في التاسعة من عمره تتكشف صفحات الأحداث شيئاً فشيئا ..
حملة الاعتقالات التي طالت أولئك الذين يرفضون الثورة الليبية ويُطالبون بالديموقراطية ، ثم حبل المشنقة الذي بدوره يتكفل بـ قطف الرؤوس !..
الرواية مُتخمة بالتفاصيل والأحاسيس الإنسانية البحتة .
القلق ، الخوف ، الترقب ، الانتظار ، النزاع الذي يعتمل في النفس البشرية ، والكثير الكثير ..
لغة الكاتب جميلة ، راقني اسلوبه السردي ..
يع More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 11, 2007

Geoff rated it:

Suleiman is a nine year old in Qaddafi's post-coup Libya. His mother is a neurotic closet alcoholic and his somewhat absentee father is a quasi counter-revolutionary. Suleiman struggles to reconcile the half-truths and "better left unsaids" from his parents' relationship and his own friendships.

Suleiman copes through the family dynamic with confusion, anger, bitterness, and meanness. By the end of the book, Suleiman is 24 years old and has no better grasp on his life tha More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 22, 2010

Nojood rated it:

It is nice to read this book in Arabic but if you can, read it in the language it was written in originaly; English. Reading the book in English gave it one more star. What amazes me is the development of the 9 year old character that took place in a small number of days. His adoration, love-hate and pitty relationship with his parents, especially his mom, is portrayed in a wonderful way. The struggle of the child between admiring the enemy and disliking him, at the same time, is shown in th More...

8 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

peter rated it:

Not bad -- similar in subject but a hell of a lot better than that contrived, unconvincing best selling rubbish, The Kite Runner. It's a story about a boy growing in Libya in the midst of feeble efforts to mount political opposition to the regime. As his father and friends attempt to meet, read "subversive" literature about democracy, and so forth, his mother, forced early into an arid marriage drinks illegally and self-demeaningly, and the boy learns some of the debased, treacherous w More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Marcy rated it:

The young son of two parents witnesses the abduction and public hanging of his next door neighbor, the father of his best friend. He also witnesses the arrest of his father. Both men were found to be treasonous against a regime of terror, the regime of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Suleiman spent days and nights, comforting his mother, and hating his mother, for the illness that took her over when her husband was not home. This illness, the reader soon discovers, is alcoholism. It is in this st More...

0 comments like

Aug 25, 2011

David rated it:

Suleiman is nine years old in 1979, when he gains the first hint that there’s more to his father Faraj’s life than he had thought; the boy believes his father to be away on business, but instead sees Faraj in Triploi, entering an unfamiliar building in Martyrs’ Square. In the months that follow, Faraj’s political activities bring him increasingly to the attention of the secret police, but the young Suleiman has little understanding of what is happening to his family.

The ‘country of men More...

0 comments like

May 31, 2011

Hind rated it:

Distractingly, I kept wondering whether this book was (semi)autobiographical. The author's father was "disappeared" in Cairo in the late 1970s and hasn't been heard from since. He could be long-dead or he could still be alive in one of Gaddafi's far-flung jails. Matar's paternal uncle had been imprisoned by Gaddafi for nearly 2 decades, before he was released sometime in the 1990s. So the whole time I was reading this book, I wondered how much of Hisham Matar is in young Suleiman?
More...

2 comments like

May 22, 2011

Carl rated it:

A weak 4 stars. A Booker nominee, it didn’t get farther, I’d guess, due to the narrative being straightforward and not incomprehensibly abstruse.
Unlike many child narrator/protagonists, Suleiman was neither precocious nor adorable, but I think for the most part he worked as a window to the themes of the book: how people had to live under the brutal dictatorship of Qaddafi, how people respond to threats and torture, and how families work (or not) under such conditions. The minor moral More...

0 comments like

Apr 11, 2011

Vera rated it:

It has been difficult for me to comprehend the arrogant statements of the dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi. When he asserts, “The people LOVE me!” in the face of thousands of ill-armed, desperate rebels trying to depose him, I think he must be out of touch with reality.

Then I read In the Country of Men and I understood a little better. The novel, written by an ex-pat Libyan, Hisham Matar , tells the horrific story of people who live under conditions similar to Stalinist Russia. In pu More...

0 comments like

Jan 20, 2011

Beatles24 rated it:

An unbelievable debut on the literary scene. It is an emotion filled book centered around the life of a 9 year old boy whose life is twisted and strewn around (and miraculously picked back up) by the vagaries of a politico-social system invented by Libya's long standing mad government. The Guide, as the decrepit Muammar al-Gadaffi is known, insinuates his sordid network of operatives into the life of young Suleiman's family and summarily executes, jails, and mentally maims in shocking ways. T More...

0 comments like

Sep 11, 2011

Asya rated it:

This is the story of a child’s view of living in the repressive Libyan society under the control of the tyrannical dictator, Moammar Ghadhaffi. This book took great courage to write being that at the time of its publication many still lived under the fear driven constraints of a society shackled by an all hope consuming brutality. It very well could have put him and his family at risk. At the date of this review most of Libya has been liberated by its own citizens ousting their long term tormen More...

0 comments like

Feb 12, 2012

Ranendu Sekhar rated it:

The very first thing I would like to say is this is one of the best book I ever have read so far in my life. I have enjoyed it, I have enjoyed the love, the grief, the tension and more over the innocence of a nine year boy.
The book has been a narration of a nine year boy, Soolma of his dreadful childhood in Libya. Libya, a country where a girl is not supposed to go out with a boy, where a girl is tested for her virginity on the first night of her marriage and to bear a son which she never More...

0 comments like

Aug 02, 2011

Samar rated it:

Sadly, a quote from Francis Bacon comes to mind, that some books should only be sampled or some such thing. This book was quite dull. I started it with great expectations; it was the first novel I had read by a Libyan writer and with Libya constantly in the news, I thought its moment had come. It is also a book narrated from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy, and I was looking forward to some innocence, humour and charm. There was not much of that- the boy seemed at once too mature and too More...

3 comments like

Feb 01, 2011

Bookguide rated it:

In Dutch, 'Niemandsland' with a different cover, www.bookcrossing.com/journal/6943123. Won as 2nd prize in a BC lottery.

Interesting story of how the choices made by his parents affect a nine-year-old boy in Gaddafi's Libya. Although it is set in Libya, there is not much local colour; it is more about the relationships within the family. Without explaining to his son, Suleiman's father is involved in subversive activities against the regime. Meanwhile Suleiman is left to his own devices More...

0 comments like

Feb 08, 2012

Rula rated it:

In The Country of Men

“Have no cause to fear, only the guilty live in fear.”

That was not the case with Suleiman, the nine-year-old boy. Fear was in the air surrounding him. Fear for his alcoholic mother who he thought needs his protection, fear for his father, the foolish dreamer, who disappeared on long business trips, this fear that seemed to absorb him and turned into panic attacks that transformed a happy child into an angry frustrated kid, whose anger came lashing out More...

1 comment like

Jan 18, 2009

Serene rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 05, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine added it

Short-listed for both the 2006 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award, Hisham Matar's novel, widely published, raises comparisons to Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (***1/2 Sept/Oct 2003). Critics agree that Matar's poetic, visual prose reflects a skill and maturity often lacking in first novels. Of the two points of view which Matar employs, the perspective of the young child narrator is effective and at times even chilling, as the baffled and terrorized Suleiman attem

More...

0 comments like

Dec 05, 2009

Laura rated it:

In the Country of Men tells the fate of a group of pro-democracy dissidents under the rule of Qaddafi and his Cultural Revolution in Libya in 1979. More than a political novel, however, the story is really about the family relationships between the narrator (who tells the story from his point of view as a 9 year old) and his parents, particularly his mother, that play out against the background of a harsh and repressive political regime. There were some similarities between this story and " More...

0 comments like

Oct 13, 2009

Katie Lynn rated it:

Best part:

"I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss. I am both repulsed and surprised, for example, by my exaggerated sentiment when parting with people I am not intimate with, promising impossible reunions. Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void, this emptiness I am trying to get at like someone frightened of the dark, searching for a match to strike. I see it i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 13, 2008

Jenny.p rated it:

The plot was predictable, and when not predicable, unlikely. There is not one strong character that I felt attached to. It drove me crazy that there is little to no historically orienting information to help the reader grasp the plot. It is important, painful subject-matter to tackle, but this fact alone doesn't make the book substantive. Disappointing.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Anita rated it:

Gaddafi's Libyan bloodless 1969 coup means that you are either with him or against him. There are no areas of gray. There is no freedom of expression and people are forced to hang the hated Gaddafi's picture in their homes, as an homage to him. Books are burned because they are evidence of dissent; men are violently taken from their homes and either killed or maimed. The women wait and suffer their own 'illnesses,' while their husbands are gone; their families ripped into fearful misundersta More...

2 comments like

Nov 05, 2010

Myself rated it:

أحببته باللغة العربية، رغم محاولتي العقيمة لقراءته بالانجليزية .شعرت بعروبته بطعم المعاني التي لا أعرف لها فهماً إلا بالعربية

في بلاد الرجال
قصة حلم بالجنة، وورق توت
قصة بعد جميل وأحلام وردية يحلمها حين يبعد عن أبيه، وقرب يجفله ويكرهه لحقيقة برودة ذلك القرب
قصته مع أم كان هو أميرها الصغير
قصة استيعاب طفل لعالم لايتكلم إلا بالألغاز

يجب أن تقتنى

من الكتاب
" أتعرفين ماما كم بذلت الملائكة من جهد، وكيف خاطرت بكل شيء لتمنحنا التوت
وكل ذلك لأنها More...

11 comments like (4 people liked it)

Nov 23, 2008

Jessica rated it:

In the Country of Men takes place in Libya, in the 1970's. This is a time and place that I know very little about, but the scope of this novel is not very wide, and the narrator gives a full picture of his world. The narrator is nine-year-old Suleiman, describing the summer when his father's rejection of ruling government brings his family much pain. Suleiman understands very little of what is going on, and so as a reader who does not know very much about this time period, I also did not underst More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 19, 2011

Lucinda rated it:

So this is the latest in a string of books I have read recently where the story is told from the perspective of a child (though somewhat confusingly, this is told back by an adult about a period in his childhood). At first I was totally impressed with this device for telling a story in a new and interesting way, but now it is starting to feel old.
This is a heartbreaking story with some really powerful and painful segments in the retelling of a young boy (only 9 years old) who experiences More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 25, 2008

Liz rated it:

So,I purchased this book thinking it was the Cormac McCarthy book, No Country for Old Men. It's not. It turns out to be another in the series of books I have been reading where children are the protagonists and are not very likable characters. The story takes place in Libya, under the terrorist regime of Qaddafi. Horrible things take place to the adults in this story, and the protagonist, a child of 9, acts selfishly and unconscientiously (is that a word?) towards his parents and his friend More...

1 comment like

Apr 20, 2010

Suzy rated it:

This book is rather like Kite Runner. It is set in Libya in the 70's and focuses on a boy's life, made unhappy by his oppressed and emotionally unbalanced mother and the dangerous anti-revolutionary secrets surrounding the men in his family. The boy is unmoored, and, as in the Kite Runner, takes it out on a friend, as well as an innocent. In the Country of Men is a quick read and quite readable, but it is not as plot driven as Kite Runner, which is a real page-turner. In the Country of Men i More...

0 comments like

reviews