Although I told myself -- and my reading public (ha!) -- that I wasn't going to limit or pressure myself into reading only books from countries I hadn't read before, I was starting to feel like I'd been reading too much in familiar territory. The prior 6 books I read were from countries I'd read before -- one was even a book I'd read before. Somewhere in the middle of that run, I started, then set aside, a book from a country I had not read. So, when I finished My Brilliant Friend and was on the fence about whether I should go straight into the next book of the Neapolitan Series, I decided instead I should check off another country from my list. To that end, I pulled out In the Country of Men, which I had picked up several months ago to represent Libya.
One thing this book brought to my attention is I don't know much of anything about Libya or its history. At some point I must have learned it had been an Italian colony (as a student of Africana Studies, I had to know all the African countries' colonial histories, though my coursework tended to emphasize sub-Saharan Africa), but that knowledge was long gone when I read this book. (Oddly, because I remember as a child thinking the name Tripoli sounded Italian, which of course it's not, but this association seems like it could have served me mnemonically.) I had no idea that it had a Roman history (which, again, should not have been so surprising, given all the Roman ruins I have personally visited in Morocco). I have what I have to admit is only the barest knowledge of the Gaddafi era. So, anyway, when I started this book and discovered it was set in the wake of the 1979 revolution, my initial reaction was, "Oh, they had one that year too?"
My ignorance of Libya aside, this book did a really good job of getting into the mind of a child who does foolish things that have potentially terrible consequences out of naivete, attention-craving, desire to please. I found the narrator's 9-year-old self often infuriating, but also utterly believable. Kids do dumb and mean things despite themselves. As you get into the narrator's head, you see that he has compassion, he just can't seem to show it. My frustration with him got in the way of my enjoyment of the book, though it was a times really lovely.
