MixedNewsdayKassabova’s sense of adventure and spontaneity, combined with a lack of artifice (she spends ample time sitting on balconies confessing that she doesn’t want to do a thing) are winning qualities in a narrator. But the flip side of this lack of artifice is a lack of structure. Although the book is divided into some sixty micro-chapters, it lacks a deeper sense of organization and pacing. Too often, Kassabova piles up anecdotes without signaling their significance; at the same time, her historical explanations are full of dry humor but cluttered and confusing ... The book’s most affecting scenes involve Middle Eastern refugees. Their stories seem to release Kassabova to express a capacious sense of loss ... Kassabova’s gifts as a poet shine when she describes the mystical, powerful landscape, the book’s true protagonist.
Hisham Matar
RaveNewsdayOne comes away from this beautiful book feeling a sense of loss for the Libya that Matar and his father, brother, mother, uncles and cousins all fought for or dreamed of. They held on to some part of this Libya even as they lived under unthinkable levels of surveillance, tracked for decades by Qaddafi’s men throughout every corner of the world. The effect of the family’s attachments is less sentimental than defiant. And although the author does not want to give Libya anything more, he has, in this profound work of witnessing and grief, given it something indeed: a testimony that, even if shaped by the brutal state, has not ultimately been erased by it. The Return, for all the questions it cannot answer, leaves a deep emotional imprint.
