The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

Overview

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing—one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.

The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as “a first-person elegy for home and father.” Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Guardian • Financial Times

“A tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read.”—The Spectator (U.K.)

“Wise and agonizing and thrilling to read.”—Zadie Smith

“[An] eloquent memoir . . . at once a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father’s fate . . . 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.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“This outstanding book . . . roves back and forth in time with a freedom that conceals the intricate precision of its art.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Truly remarkable . . . a book with a profound faith in the consolations of storytelling . . . a testament to [Matar’s] father, his family and his country.”—The Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

“The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. . . . Likely to become a classic.”—Colm Tóibín

“Matar’s evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov.”—The Washington Post

“Utterly riveting.”—The Boston Globe

“A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian

“Beautiful . . . The Return, for all the questions it cannot answer, leaves a deep emotional imprint.”—Newsday

“A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging, and above all, family. It is, as well, a study of the shaping—and breaking—of the bonds between fathers and sons. . . . This is writing of the highest quality.”—The Sunday Times (U.K.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812994827
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/05/2016
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano, and the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.

Read an Excerpt

1. Trapdoor
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner)"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Hisham Matar.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

1 Trapdoor 3

2 Black Suit 16

3 The Sea 28

4 The Land 35

5 Blo' thaah 40

6 Poems 51

7 Your Health? Your Family? 62

8 The Truce and the Clementine 67

9 The Old Man and His Son 76

10 The Flag 85

11 The Last Light 92

12 Benghazi 103

13 Another Life 113

14 The Bullet 122

15 Maximilian 144

16 The Campaign 159

17 The Dictator's Son 171

18 The Good Manners of Vultures 190

19 The Speech 196

20 Years 206

21 The Bones 220

22 The Patio 234

Acknowledgments 241

Editorial Reviews

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…Matar's interest in authoritarian politics has less to do with its apparatus of repression, its surveillance of intellectuals or the psychology of charismatic leadership…and more with the way this style of politics makes itself felt in everyday life, in everything from hand gestures and ritual greetings to home décor and the relations between parents and children. In his attentions to these details, the province of realist fiction as well as memoir, Matar gives the reader an intimate sense of what living under a dictatorship feels like…[Matar's] 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.

The New York Times Book Review - Robyn Creswell

…[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…Mr. Matar's account of the suffering in Libya…reads like a microcosm of what the Middle East has experienced as the democratic hopes fostered by the Arab Spring have crashed and burned in one country after another. At the same time, The Return stands as a haunting memoir about one family, and one son's Telemachus-like search for his father.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

02/01/2016
Matar's fraught coming-of-age fiction debut, In the Country of Men, was a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and won six international awards; his follow-up, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was best-booked by the Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. Here, he recounts his family history as vital backstory to those works. More than three decades ago, when Matar was 12 years old, his family fled Libya for Egypt. Eight years later, his diplomat-turned-dissident father was snatched from a Cairo street by the Libyan government and presumably held in its most horrific prison. As the author relates, he returned to Libya after Qaddafi's 2012 overthrow, hoping against hope to find his father still alive. To be excerpted in The New Yorker.

Library Journal

★ 2016-04-18
Novelist Matar (Anatomy of a Disappearance, 2011, etc.) returns to his native Libya in 2012 following a three-decade exile.At the center of this moving and vividly documented memoir is the author's quest to find answers to his father's disappearance in 1990. Jaballa Matar had formerly worked for the Libyan delegation to the United States yet later became an influential political dissident who, in reacting against Muammar Gaddafi's revolutionary regime, was forced to flee with his family from their home in Tripoli to Cairo. A decade later, while the author was a student in London, his father was kidnapped in the streets of Cairo by forces in the Libyan government. Though his eventual whereabouts would remain uncertain, he was likely held prisoner in the notorious Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, where he may have perished in the 1996 massacre of over 1,200 prisoners. Matar provides an intimate and absorbing account of the complex political events that would eventually lead to Gaddafi's downfall. As he shifts his focus between past and present events, allowing details of his father's disappearance to slowly and subtly emerge, he reveals a suspense novelist's seasoned instincts. In his ruminations on returning to a long-forgotten family and country, and the consequences of time passing, he applies a poet's sensibility. "Somebody would be telling an anecdote and midway through I would realize I had heard it before," he writes. "It seemed as if everyone else's development had been linear, allowed to progress naturally in the known environment, and therefore each of them seemed to have remained linked, even if begrudgingly or in disagreement, to the original setting-off point. At times I was experiencing a kind of distance-sickness, a state in which not only the ground was unsteady but also time and space." A beautifully written, harrowing story of a son's search for his father and how the impact of inexplicable loss can be unrelenting while the strength of family and cultural ties can ultimately sustain.

Kirkus Reviews

[Hisham 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. . . . 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.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“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 a revolution, and an impassioned work of mourning. . . . For all its terrible human drama . . . 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.”—Robyn Creswell, The New York Times Book Review

“[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 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.”—The Wall Street Journal

“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. . . . 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.”—Newsday

“A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart by the savage realities of today’s Middle East. The crushing of hopes raised by the Arab spring—at both the personal and national levels—is conveyed all the more powerfully because Matar’s anger remains controlled, his belief in humanity undimmed.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Best Summer Books,” The Guardian

“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. . . . Matar’s evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov . . . but where Nabokov’s loss of country and father were public and final . . . Matar’s are frustratingly indefinite. . . . There is no record. There is no grave. Only this elegy by a son who, through his eloquence, defies the men who wanted to erase his father and gifts him with a kind of immortality.”—The Washington Post

“The Return is not about one family. It’s the story of Libyan opposition and resistance, although the Matar family shapes the storyline. . . . The book describes how, cruelly, even the dimmest ray of hope can keep the families of the disappeared from accepting the possibility of their loss.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“In this triptych of beloved country, father, and the art that survives, Matar moves us with the force of his compassion, grace, and fury. . . . 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.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“An utterly riveting account of a devoted son’s quest to learn the fate—not necessarily the truth—of Jaballa Matar.”—The Boston Globe

“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 . . . Even in the face of unspeakable injustice, family and stories possess the power to help one endure.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Few trips could be as emotionally freighted as the one taken by Libyan-raised novelist Hisham Matar in his thriller-like memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between, about the post-Qaddafi search for his dissident father—and his own deeply ambivalent sense of homecoming.”—Vogue

“He writes eloquent and precise prose, and his deep inquiry into his father’s imprisonment and absence, and the conflicting details about his death, blend with consideration of Libya’s politics and history, to create a deeply resonant memoir.”—National Book Review

“A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging, and above all, family. It is, as well, a study of the shaping—and breaking—of the bonds between fathers and sons. . . . This is writing of the highest quality.”—Sunday Times (London)

“At times almost unbearably moving . . . Hisham Matar is an observer and listener of enormous subtlety and sensitivity, and he writes English prose as cleanly and clearly as it can be written. This is a story of terrible deeds, but also a tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read.”—The Spectator

“A truly remarkable book. From the raw materials of his anger, his suffering, and his guilt, Matar has built a testament to his father, his family and his country. . . . It is a book with a profound faith in the consolations of storytelling. . . . The Return is an act of defiant remembering”—Daily Telegraph (UK)

“[A] magnificent book . . . Deeply affecting.”—The Times (UK)

“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.”—Financial Times (UK)

“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.”—The Economist

“[Matar] reveals a suspense novelist’s seasoned instincts . . . A beautifully written, harrowing story of a son’s search for his father and how the impact of inexplicable loss can be unrelenting while the strength of family and cultural ties can ultimately sustain.”—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“A magnificent memoir of exile and loss. Hisham Matar writes Libya’s contemporary history with a Proustian sensibility and the intellect of Al-Jahiz. A timeless read.”—Rawi Hage

“The Return is a personal memoir, concerned with the kidnapping and disappearance of the writer’s father at the hands of the Qaddafi regime. It is wise and agonizing and thrilling to read.”—Zadie Smith

“What a brilliant book. Hisham Matar has the quality all historians—of the world and the self—most need: He knows how to stand back and let the past speak. In chronicling his quest for his father, his manner is fastidious, even detached, but his anger is raw and unreconciled; through his narrative art he bodies out the shape of loss and gives a universality to his very particular experience of desolation. The Return reads as easily as a thriller, but is a story that will stick: A person is lost, but gravity and resonance remain.”—Hilary Mantel

“The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. It draws a memorable portrait of a family in exile and manages also to explore the politics of Libya with subtlety and steely intelligence. It is a quest for the truth in a dark time, constructed with a novelist's skill, written in tones that are both precise and passionate. It is likely to become a classic.”—Colm Tóibín

“A triumph of art over tyranny, structurally thrilling, intensely moving, The Return is a treasure for the ages.”—Peter Carey

“The Return is tremendously powerful. Although it filled me with rage again and again, I never lost sight of Matar’s beautiful intelligence as he tried to get to the heart of the mystery. I am so very grateful he has written this book.”—Nadeem Aslam

From the Publisher