For a moment Hisham Matar is apologetic about not conveying his words in Italian. Everyone knows it to be sincere (and all the more endearing): his conversation with Paolo Giordano is thoughtful and generous. Even to a fault. Soon Matar is launching into jolly recklessness, citing entire passages from Ovid and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Marina Astrologo, the translator for the event, is desperate but pulls through, deepening the debt the Festival’s audience has accrued with her over the years.

Matar never intended to write about the event propelling his third novel, yet his three protagonists are only a little older than he was at the time. Setting the stage for My Friends is the shooting outside Libya’s embassy in London, quenching protests against Gaddafi on 17 April 1984. We follow Khaled, Mustafa and Hosam as time passes, after Gaddafi’s death and up to the current age of instability, inscrutable even for Matar himself.

It is a study in friendship. From the very first paragraphs, read aloud as dusk engulfs Palazzo S. Sebastiano, we are transported to the moment when relationships “end, wane or simply dissolve into nothing”. The tension of such a watershed echoes that between exile and return, ever present in Matar’s life and work. The Return, his memoir reckoning with the costs imposed on his family by Libya’s dictatorship, was visceral and necessary. It opened a space for his return to novels. Yet, “all writing is invested in exile”, he suggests.

Matar’s own relationship with exile and return, though, has changed. In a few words, “crudely” he warns, “there are many different ways to die and there are many different ways to live”. His fascination has now turned to the latter. “Perhaps it’s middle age”, he chuckles. Matar describes himself as studious, patient, so different from a father who nonetheless enjoyed his temperament – a sweetness all parents could aspire to. In the fictional world of My Friends, Khaled’s father is another character entirely, inviting his son to be cautious and avoid political confrontation. Pressed about this departure, Matar contends that all is possible if writing remains a “porous space”.

How does one mesh the world of possibilities of stories and history’s path, one that may seem unrelenting, unforgiving, blind to messiness? When Paolo Giordano confronts Matar with Italy’s colonial violence in Libya, the political is once more a family matter. Both of the author’s grandfathers fought in the resistance. After independence, his mother had Italian neighbours, his father regularly visited family friends in Rome. “We’re sentimental peoples”, Matar allows himself a generalisation, but his recounting is not meant as a feel-good story.

There’s much more when one resists automatic abbreviations. Commenting on how writing can attest to such complexity, Matar lets something
slip without elaborating: “Lately, I’ve become very interested in the degree to which we pay attention”. It was, we understood later, a suitable definition not just for his work, but for his individual disposition - and for friendship itself.