The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner): Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Hisham Matar’s, The Return, is neither a straightforward autobiography, nor a neat chronicle of Libya under tyranny. It merits reading for two reasons. First, it does provide detailed sketches of what life was like under Gaddafi. Second, it is a testament to the power of a son’s love for his father. I’m going to focus on the former. Libya, for good or ill, is not much written about in the United States and, when it is mentioned, the news is almost always bad, if not tragic. First and foremost, there’s Lockerbie, and more recently, the fact that a former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been charged with taking funds from Libya in exchange for political favors.) There can be no doubt that Libyans suffered under a tyrannical regime while Gaddafi ruled. One of the great attributes of Mr. Matar’s text is that he takes readers deep inside the fascist state and exposes its many crimes. Surely, one of the saddest stories I’ve read anywhere is Matar’s account of a mother who, every year for five years, visited the prison in Tripoli where she understood her son to be held. She was never permitted to see her son, but the guards assured her that the meals she cooked and the gifts she brought would be delivered to him. Without fail, they encouraged her to return and wished her better luck next time. And, return she did, year after year, not knowing that her son had been dead all those years. Matar has a great eye for detail and a novelist’s ability to capture that detail in prose. In my experience, books like this don’t come around that often. Readers ought to take advantage of it.

I decided to buy this book based on an NPR radio interview with the author that I heard soon after the book's release. He had such a wonderful speaking voice and delivery that it made me want to buy the book thinking and hoping that his prose would be as beautiful. It is. In addition, having lost my own father when I was barely 21 (although in much less complicated conditions than the author's), any story about fathers and sons always will catch my interest. In the end I couldn't give this a 5-star rating. Something was missing and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps it is that, while I can relate to the issue of a lost father and memories, I am not muslim or from the African continent...nor am I a political exile. Therefore, I couldn't relate completely to the author's pain and resolve. What I did get was a good education on Libya, of which I know only what I've seen in the news for the past 30 years. I learned more than I knew about Qaddafi's brutality and of the life of exiles throughout the continent and Europe. The prose is very nice and easy to read....sometimes too easy. I found myself going back to re-read some passages because I had a feeling I might have missed something beautiful or revealing. That was the case more often than I am proud to admit. The author was very successful in putting the reader---at least me---in a situation in which I pictured my father, my family and me in the same situation. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, but it wasn't meant to be. Many of us are very lucky just because we were born in a free country. This book will make you think of how lucky those people are indeed and just how un-lucky many others are. Overall, I recommend this book as a pleasant, informative, powerful and educational read that will make the reader reflect. It doesn't resolve as clearly as I had hoped, but it is not hard to suppose what happened after the book's end.

Heart-ful story written with aplomb. This is a gifted writer with a story that has now been told. It needs to be rested.

This is an excellent writer, who has a beautiful way of expressing and capturing life. Unfortunately, this book is about too little. He thinks about, misses and eventually looks for his father. Even though the writing is superb I didn't finish the book because it didn't captivate me. I knew the ending, I knew he suspected the ending, and I didn't need to read anymore.

This story is autobiographical in the Qaddafi era in Libya but the family live in Egypt. The father is a dissident and spends long periods away from home. On one of these occasions he is kidnapped by the regime. His son, the author of this story grows up through the years of his disappearance, suffers the loss of his father and his mother takes to alcohol to console herself. Many members of the extended family are also kidnapped. They, however are eventually released. Not so for the father and the story ends with the conclusion that he must have been shot in the 1996 massacre in Abu Salim jail which was liberated by the rebels. Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011 after 40 years rule. This is a heart felt story, very well written and holds the tension of the search until the last page.

When Muammar Gaddafi took over as a dictator in Libya, he ordered that his opponents be rounded up and imprisoned. Hisham Matar was nineteen when most of the male members of his family were disappeared, uncles, cousins and his father. They were imprisoned in the most notorious prison, Abu Salim where torture and interrogations were the norm along with deprivation of food and any comforts. Most lived there for over twenty years and were only released with the overthrow of Gaddaffi and his government. Matar's father, Jaballah, was never heard from again although it is suspected that he was one of the over one thousand men who were killed one day by firing squad at the prison. This book tells the story of Matar's return to Libya after living his life in Egypt and England. He reunites with his male relatives and uses whatever connections he has to try to get a definite answer about his father. Was he killed that day? Is he still imprisoned? Although one hears about cases like this, only the concrete recollections of someone who has lost a relative and gone through years of agony trying to find the answers brings it home in such a definite way. This memoir won the Pulitzer Prize and Matar has been listed for the Booker several times, including this year. His love and his search is inspiring while the understanding of what those men went through for twenty years, losing the best years of their lives and their dreams of how their lives would turn out is heartbreaking. This book is recommended for nonfiction readers.

A personal account of how one family was affected by its patriarch's involvement in the opposition of the Qaddafi regime. My interest was maintained throughout. However, I was more interested in Libya's journey from colonialism under fascist Italy to the present and how it affected Matar's extended family than his visits to European museums and the like even though the latter was written with a literary flair. It gave me better context for my experiences during my visits to Libya before the Arab spring, an understanding of why people were too guarded to discuss politics, and the heavy security presence by the regime. But more than anything it is a testimony of love written by a son seeking closure who was robbed from a chance to say goodbye.

I found the prose of this book to be mesmerizing though by midway…the exhaustive lengthiness of each though process became burdensom….and frankly I was hoping for some answer at the ending.

Among the most beautifully written and elegiac of memoirs that I have ever read. A tale of memories and places connected with family - grand-fathers and fathers - uncles and cousins - in exile and incarcerated in the prisons of invaders and of dictators. Torture mixed with searching - smuggled letters and whispers of sightings - oh weep for Libya and the interference of selfish vested interests! Hisham MATAR tells the story of too many of us - of suffering in our own lands -and of dispersal to the world. I write this brief review in Australia where a banal-looking self-described "democratic" government locks up asylum-seekers fleeing despots - then tortures them in off-shore island gulags - unto death - while bleating about keeping the citizens safe with strong border controls. Hideous! Beyond hideous. Our Quaddafi goes under various names - including those of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Dutton - among others. This books shines a spotlight on dictatorships in general. Thank you Hisham MATAR!

Privileged access into the psyche of the son of a Libyan political dissident, who strives to come to terms with the fact that his father - who was arrested without warning during the author's childhood - was probably killed in a State authorised massacre whilst a political prisoner in Libya's most infamous prison. At times this was a desperately sad read. It reminded me, in parts, of the narratives of Auschwitz survivors and religiously affiliated prisoners of the former Eastern Bloc Communist regimes. Overall this was a book that made me commit - emotionally, practically and financially - to the promotion of universal human rights; and not many books in my experience have made such an impression.

I think I enjoyed this book but I don't remember to develop more, sorry!

Very good books. Easy arrival. Thanks

Adorei o livro. Conciso, preciso, rico, tocante, realista. Expõe os sentimentos humanos, o que é importante, em construções imagéticas que tocam profundamente nossa alma..