The Return

I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.

I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our… show more.

The Return taught me that it is an act of homage to go to any ends to find out what really happened to a family member lost or killed in a conflict: in Matar’s case, his father, Jaballa, missing in Libya during Gaddafi’s brutal regime. His storytelling is both an act of desperation and unstinting hope. Though his father is lost, in these pages he is resurrected. 

In 1990 Hisham Matar’s father, Jaballah Matar, was abducted, imprisoned, and at some point most likely murdered by the Ghaddafi regime. This traumatic experience has shaped Matar’s four published works to date, though in varied ways that allow us to see, in different modes, the redemptive power of imagination.

In his memoir The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between, Matar examines the geopolitical realities of disappearance, but also its familial, private, and symbolic dimensions – masterfully weaving history, journalism, scholarship, family narrative, and lyric evocation of the clear, beautiful, and sometimes-brutal Mediterranean land- and seascape.