Hisham Matar and Edmund White

‘Father’s literary memory was like a floating library.’

– Hisham Matar, The Return

‘One of my books is called The Burning Library, an allusion to the saying that when an old person dies a library burns. Bernard’s mental library was the size of the Bibliotheque nationale.’

– Edmund White, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

Hisham Matar and V.S. Naipaul

“All the books on the modern history of the country could fit neatly on a couple of shelves. The best amongst them is slim enough to slide into my coat pocket and be read in a day or two. There are many other histories, of course, concerning those who, over the past three millenia, occupied Libya: the Phoenicans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottomans, and, most recently, the Italians. A Libyan hoping to glimpse something of that past must, like an intruder at a private party, enter such books in the full knowledge that most of them were not written by or for him, and, therefore, at hear, they are accounts concerning the lives of others, their adventures and misadventures in Libya, as though one’s own country is but an opportunity for foreigners to exorcize their demons and live out their ambitions.”

• Hisham Matar, ‘The Return‘

 

“Brilliant… true autobiography arises when a man encounters something in life which shocks him into the need for self-examination and self-explanation. It was natural that a sojourn in India should provide this shock for Naipaul… the experience was not a pleasant one, but the pain the author suffered was creative rather than numbing… tender, lyrical, explosive and cruel.”

• John Wain in The Observer, on the blurb of V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness