As reckonings-up go, this is a sombre ledger; I never stopped wishing that this book had not needed to be written, that the experiences that gave birth to it had not happened. But Matar has turned it into something exquisite, too. Shafts of light will come in, and sometimes they are dazzling. A son massages his beloved father’s feet. A mother whispers a line from a smuggled letter. A boy makes a new friend in an English boarding school. A man embraces an uncle, feeling the bones of his 'prison body.' A family, big and fond, is reunited over nuts, pastries and sweet tea. Matar has a reserve that only makes his way with intimacy all the more moving. Critics like to call books unflinching but the point about this one is that its author flinches all the time; it’s in his turning away that we feel his unfathomable sorrow, not in those moments when he describes, as he sometimes must, all the unspeakable ways in which the regime liked to torture its prisoners; the great pile of bloodied watches collected by the guards after the Abu Salim massacre.
Here, in The Return, [Matar] writes with both a novelist’s eye for physical and emotional detail, and a reporter’s tactile sense of place and time. The prose is precise, economical, chiseled; the narrative elliptical, almost musical, cutting back and forth in time between the near present, Mr. Matar’s childhood memories of growing up in Libya, and pieced-together accounts of his father’s work as an opposition leader and his imprisonment. The Return is, at once, a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father’s fate at the hands of a brutal dictatorship, and a son’s efforts to come to terms with his father’s ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence.
Out of his protracted torment Matar has forged a memoir that in its nuance and nobility bears unforgettable witness to love, to courage and to humanity. The Return is also a subtle and nimble work of art. It shifts elegantly between past and present, between dialogue and soliloquy, between urgent, even suspenseful action and probing meditations on exile, grief and loss...The Return deserves a place in the exalted company of those who 'hope against hope' — as Nadezhda Mandelstam called her great testimony of the loss of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, to Stalin’s gulag.
It seems unfair to call Hisham Matar’s extraordinary new book a memoir, since it is so many other things besides: a reflection on exile and the consolations of art, an analysis of authoritarianism, a family history, a portrait of a country in the throes of revolution, and an impassioned work of mourning...Hisham Matar is no revolutionary. As a writer, he is more interested in the mysteries of domestic life than in the abstractions of politics. His book is not a declaration of independence from father or country, but precisely a study of roots and relations. For all its terrible human drama and grotesque political background, the most impressive thing about The Return is that it also tells a common story, the story of sons everywhere who have lost their fathers, as all sons eventually must.
I never stopped wishing that this book had not needed to be written, that the experiences that gave birth to it had not happened. But Matar has turned it into something exquisite, too. Shafts of light will come in, and sometimes they are dazzling ... Matar has a reserve that only makes his way with intimacy all the more moving. Critics like to call books unflinching but the point about this one is that its author flinches all the time; it’s in his turning away that we feel his unfathomable sorrow ... his book is bounded by a magnificent gentleness, a softness and care the reader experiences as a blessing.
The Return roves back and forth in time with a freedom that conceals the intricate precision of its art. One of the greatest achievements of this outstanding book is a narrative design that keeps us hungry for new information even when we suspect exactly what has happened ... Mr. Matar’s lens zooms in and out to take in three generations of his family as well as the sweep of 20th-century Libyan history. We meet his grandfather, a fighter in the Libyan resistance against Benito Mussolini, as well as numerous uncles and cousins who later clashed with Gadhafi’s similarly despotic regime ... Mr. Matar is not a wonderful writer because his father disappeared or because his homeland is a mess: He is a brilliant narrative architect and prose stylist, his pared-down approach and measured pace a striking complement to the emotional tumult of his material ... This book is an extraordinary gift for us all.
...[a] breathtaking memoir ... Matar’s prose is both spare and soaring, transporting in the way a great painting or musical composition can be. His words are selected with careful intention; his sentences are at once poetic and conversational, his themes particular and universal. He masterfully depicts the shrinking that comes with exile.
Mr Matar’s questions, however, go well beyond politics. This beautifully written memoir deals with the nature of family, the emotions of exile and the ties that link the present with the past—in particular the son with his father, Jaballa Matar...This book is not the first time that Mr Matar has explored 'the land in between' in his search for his father. Much of his memoir appeared in an article in the New Yorker three years ago. But what gradually emerges from this longer version is a more nuanced portrait of the author himself.
Hisham Matar’s book-length elegy is significant both because of the story and for the way the story is told. In this triptych of beloved country, father, and the art that survives, Matar moves us with the force of his compassion, grace, and fury ... Matar has created something rare and literary with The Return, his own prayer for the dead ... not simply an account of forgiveness: anger, suffering, and loss flow all the way through in Matar’s precise and lyrical prose ... The Return is one of the most notable memoirs of our generation, by one of our most elegant living writers. In his testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit, Hisham Matar has shown us what language can do.
[The Return is] a moving new memoir that is as much a commentary on the power of art as it is a harrowing tale of life under totalitarian rule [with] prose that often has the pacing of the best spy novels ... That’s one of the messages of this gorgeously written book: Even in the face of unspeakable injustice, family and stories possess the power to help one endure.
One 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.
