Hisham Matar interview: ‘I carried this novel in my head for a decade’

The author of My Friends, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about the classic that inspired him to become a writer, and why he always returns to Proust

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book

I wrote the opening paragraph and carried it in my head for a decade before I sat down to write the book. During that time I felt it work on me: the narrator’s voice, the logic of his sentences, and his abiding passion for his friends. I gradually understood that the book was also a walk – a mapping of an exile, a city and a state of mind – that it was both thematically as well as metaphysically about friendship, its prose and syntax growing more familiar as it progressed, so that reading it would resemble a growing intimacy.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

Ibn Battuta’s Travels, the mischievous and acrobatic essays of Al-Jahiz, and Italo Calvino’s early short stories would be contenders. In poetry, Nizar Qabbani and Constantine Cavafy ran through my boyish days. But if I must choose one book, it would have to be The Arabian Nights, and if I’m to single out one sentence in that multifarious toolbox of a book, it would be when Shahrazad asks that most consequential question, ‘Do I have your permission to tell a story?’ which gradually, night after night, helps to distract the maddened Sultan away from his bloody intent.

The book that made me want to become a writer

The Catcher in the Rye – I know, hardly original. But I remember drinking it on a sweltering afternoon in Cairo, lying diagonally in bed beneath a racing ceiling fan when I was 19. I haven’t read it since, but it was for me then a deeply generous and generative book, in that it made me want to write.

Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald — *Offshore* by Penelope Fitzgerald

The book I return to time and time again

Remembrance of Things Past, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. It never ceases to fascinate and delight me, and when times are hard, or I encounter something ugly or painful, I open it and read a few lines. Proust is magisterial without ever wanting you to fall on your knees. Instead, he taps the seat beside him, as though to say, ‘Come, let me show you this.’

The book I can’t get out of my head

Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, which lives in my veins. And a few days ago, I finished Michael Ondaatje’s new and magnificent poetry collection, The Year of Last Things, and had to reread it straight away. I’m captured by his longing and active poems, constantly searching for the points of severance and connection. Come to think of it, both books do that, as though, they seem to say, to live is to survey and to mend, and to fail at both and to never stop trying. Reading them, I am with each word.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

I’d say every book that has ever meant anything to me has done that, although rarely in obvious ways, of course. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North showed me the power and limitations – or the powerful limitations – of hearsay. Recently, reading Bernard Williams’ philosophical essays on Truth and Truthfulness made me feel at once returned to myself as well as having my entire thinking ever so quietly nudged by Williams’ methodical and convivial persistence in weighing up the matter, turning it this way and that.

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

Javier Marias’ The Dark Back of Time. I remember reading it on the bus and feeling some of those passive assumptions that we somehow pick up, often with little thought, fall away. I was fortunate to know Marias. He and I exchanged several letters, but I don’t remember ever telling him how much I loved that book. And so it surprised me when, a few weeks before he unexpectedly died, he sent me, with our mutual friend Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a copy of that book, in which he added a beautiful note and his fleeting signature.

Proust is magisterial without ever wanting you to fall on your knees

The book that impressed me the most

Three come to mind: Ernest Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which manages to hold, within the folds of its silences, the unsayable, and does so with such a natural light touch that the whole book seems to resonate suspended in one’s heart; Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where the entire novel is motored by ideas and their temperaments; and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Woolf understands, perhaps better than any writer I’ve read, that no turn is more profound or dramatic than that of the mind.

The book I’m reading at the moment

I’ve only started reading Iris Murdoch this year. So far I’ve read the novels A Severed Head and The Sea, the Sea, and a short book of philosophy, The Sovereignty of Good, and in each there is the elegance of her mind, its ardent independence and poise, together with a faint but mournful restraint, as though she were writing from a place to which she had reluctantly retreated, and from where she cannot totally rely on our sympathy, and yet, from within that doubt, what great passion and clarity she manages to muster.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

I’ve always loved An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, which happens to be the year I moved to Britain. And, because I like pairings, two books that evoke London’s waterways: Michael Ondaatje’s beautiful Warlight, longlisted in 2018, and that gem that is Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, which won in 1979 (the year my family went into exile).