Hisham Matar My Friends

《My Friends》书评：一场关于流亡、记忆与友谊的温柔回望‌

‌一句话总结：‌ 这本书像一杯温热的阿拉伯咖啡，苦涩里带着回甘，讲的是被迫远离家乡的人如何在异国他乡用回忆和友情修补破碎的生活。
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主角是个利比亚流亡者，年轻时因为动荡逃到英国，一待就是几十年。小说用他重返伦敦旧友聚会的方式，串起过去和现在——那些关于故土的记忆、在异乡的孤独，以及几个同样漂泊的朋友如何成为彼此的家人。
‌ 没有刻意煽情，但字里行间能感受到那种“既不属于这里，也回不去那里”的撕裂感。比如主角描述利比亚的橄榄树气味，或是听到阿拉伯语广播时的恍惚，细节特别戳人。书中几个朋友的关系写得真实又温暖——有争吵，有沉默，也有深夜厨房里的抱头痛笑。他们像拼图一样，用各自的故事勉强拼出一个“家”的形状。

本书荣获2024年美国全国书评人协会奖小说奖及英国奥威尔政治小说奖，被誉为“一部关于友谊、流亡与政治暴力的杰作”‌。评论界称赞其“以个人史诗折射中东近代史”，同时保持了文学的普世性‌。

‌金句摘抄：‌
“我们以为流亡是关于地点的改变，后来才明白，它其实是时间的断裂——你永远活在‘从前’和‘现在’的缝隙里。”

书名：My Friends

作者：Hisham Matar

简介：From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return , a luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile

The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.