"My father had beautiful hands like theirs, the skin cool and soft."
THE RETURN
Hisham Matar
The author, a Libyan writer of some acclaim, is nineteen, a university student in England, when his father, a strident opponent of the Qaddafi regime, is kidnapped and, it is later discovered, held in the secret Abu Salim prison in Libya. That is the only bit of concrete knowledge Matar will ever hold regarding the fate of his father. The rest is conjecture and mystery and questions and promised answers and searching and hope and fear and despair and more hope.
This book has, for its spine, Matar's return, twenty-two years later, to the home country he swore he'd never visit again. So many clues and hints point to his father's death in an infamous prison massacre. And yet so many point to his still possibly being alive. Much of the novel occupies that liminal space, which allows Matar to skip back and forth in time, recounting memories with cousins and paternal figures with whom he would later be reunited upon either their release from prison or the prison's eventual destruction in the midst of nationwide revolution. The landscape transforms in vertiginous fashion when memories of reluctant childhood odysseys into the desert are immediately followed by urgent, purposeful adult quests on that same stretch of road decades later. In between the the Disappearance and the Return is a viciously waged and surprisingly effective human rights campaign, spearheaded by Matar, to secure the release of prisoners, in the ultimate hope of gaining some final understanding of his father's fate.
The family lineage is storied. Matar's father was a prominent political opponent and, prior, a government man whose position allowed him to raise a cosmopolitan, well-traveled family. Matar's grandfather was a leader in the resistance against Italian colonialism. So perhaps parentage dictated Matar's story as much as circumstance. In that same vein, the personal and political blend here in heartrending and scopic fashion, Matar's quest for his father juxtaposed against the history of this place called Libya, its political paroxysms and those moments of hopeful quiet in between epochs of collapse and carnage.
This book catches me at a time when I'm much preoccupied with thoughts of fatherhood and the idea of how much mystery fathers can be to their sons. How, even while they are fathers, they are whole persons with histories, at times being nothing more than an all-knowing but inscrutable black box.
The back-and-forth nature of the book would suggest a sort of narrative chaos, but there is order to it. Or a sort of metonymy at work. Fear is chaotic, as is hope, made flesh in Matar's frenzied search for his father as a younger man. But storytelling orders it. And, here, the chaos itself is servant to an incredible precision. It renders the grief specific, the meditative anguish and the bursts of rage unique. Paradoxically, that opens the effort up to startling resonance. Matar writes on page 31 "We need a father to rage against." And while I saw that the shape of Matar's father's absence was specific to him, I also saw myself twinned, seen, and articulated.
Hisham Matar
The author, a Libyan writer of some acclaim, is nineteen, a university student in England, when his father, a strident opponent of the Qaddafi regime, is kidnapped and, it is later discovered, held in the secret Abu Salim prison in Libya. That is the only bit of concrete knowledge Matar will ever hold regarding the fate of his father. The rest is conjecture and mystery and questions and promised answers and searching and hope and fear and despair and more hope.
This book has, for its spine, Matar's return, twenty-two years later, to the home country he swore he'd never visit again. So many clues and hints point to his father's death in an infamous prison massacre. And yet so many point to his still possibly being alive. Much of the novel occupies that liminal space, which allows Matar to skip back and forth in time, recounting memories with cousins and paternal figures with whom he would later be reunited upon either their release from prison or the prison's eventual destruction in the midst of nationwide revolution. The landscape transforms in vertiginous fashion when memories of reluctant childhood odysseys into the desert are immediately followed by urgent, purposeful adult quests on that same stretch of road decades later. In between the the Disappearance and the Return is a viciously waged and surprisingly effective human rights campaign, spearheaded by Matar, to secure the release of prisoners, in the ultimate hope of gaining some final understanding of his father's fate.
The family lineage is storied. Matar's father was a prominent political opponent and, prior, a government man whose position allowed him to raise a cosmopolitan, well-traveled family. Matar's grandfather was a leader in the resistance against Italian colonialism. So perhaps parentage dictated Matar's story as much as circumstance. In that same vein, the personal and political blend here in heartrending and scopic fashion, Matar's quest for his father juxtaposed against the history of this place called Libya, its political paroxysms and those moments of hopeful quiet in between epochs of collapse and carnage.
This book catches me at a time when I'm much preoccupied with thoughts of fatherhood and the idea of how much mystery fathers can be to their sons. How, even while they are fathers, they are whole persons with histories, at times being nothing more than an all-knowing but inscrutable black box.
The back-and-forth nature of the book would suggest a sort of narrative chaos, but there is order to it. Or a sort of metonymy at work. Fear is chaotic, as is hope, made flesh in Matar's frenzied search for his father as a younger man. But storytelling orders it. And, here, the chaos itself is servant to an incredible precision. It renders the grief specific, the meditative anguish and the bursts of rage unique. Paradoxically, that opens the effort up to startling resonance. Matar writes on page 31 "We need a father to rage against." And while I saw that the shape of Matar's father's absence was specific to him, I also saw myself twinned, seen, and articulated.