Hisham Matar, The Return *** 1/2

The Return is a memoir from the writer and Libyan exile Hisham Matar about his efforts to discover the fate of his father, who was kidnapped and jailed by the Qaddafi regime in 1990 when Hisham was a nineteen-year-old university student. He returns to Libya in the aftermath of Qaddafi's fall to visit his extended family.

Matar's goal is to capture an emotion, a mood, so the story is told impressionistically through linked incidents from the present day, from Matar's childhood, and various points during adulthood as he advocates for international assistance in stopping the human rights abuses in Libya.

Several of the vignettes are powerful and effectively capture a complex feeling; I especially remember the time when Hisham befriended another Libyan student at a boarding school in England but had to do so under an assumed name, and (at the other end of the timeline) when he visited a memorial to the victims of the 1996 prison massacre where his father most likely died.

I would expect The Return to resonate strongly with exiles and those with families caught up in authoritarian oppression. It's a story about losing the country of your childhood as much as it is about growing up with uncertainty about your father's fate. As a person who has suffered neither of these misfortunes, I understand Matar's insights intellectually but don't really feel them.

Landon Beach, The Sail ***

The Sail is the epitome of a three-star genre book: a moderately engaging story comprised of reasonably well executed thriller clichés.

Robin Morris and his teenage son plan to circumnavigate Lake Superior in a thirty-six-foot sailboat, diving to famous shipwrecks along the way. They stumble upon sunken treasure and run afoul of the criminals who have been searching for it for decades. 

Were I Mr Beach's editor, I would recommend slimming down the setup. The sailing trip doesn't launch until page 100, they discover the jewels on page 173, and the bad guys show up on page 185 (of 223). The thriller portion consists of a single action sequence that occupies about as many pages as Robin's journal entries explaining life lessons to his son. The author wants to make us care about his characters and provide a sense of realism, but he uses too much mundane detail to do so.

I would also recommend a more straightforward villain. All the story requires is a ruthless thief or drug dealer, but we get a full-on Bond villain with a secret lair who kidnaps women and drugs them into being his mistresses. For the sake of the story I'm willing to suspend my disbelief about Robin's remarkable combat skills, but the hidden cave door and forced sexual initiations are too ridiculous.

Spoiler alert! Despite the setup I described above, the bad guys actually attack Robin and his son to recapture one of the kidnapped women. The jewels are a MacGuffin and turn out to be located within swimming distance of the villain's lair. 

I'll stop here before I talk myself into lowering its rating.

Robert Pantano, The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence ***

You couldn't formulate a more enticing title!

As our awareness has progressed alongside everything else, we have found ourselves outgrowing more comfortable, shortsighted narratives of life and moving into a realm in which there appears to be no clear narrative or reason at all, but rather, an absurdity and meaningless underpinning everything. This is perhaps one of, if not the greatest contemporary issue of mankind -- finding motivation and a sense of meaning in a period of time in which existence has revealed itself to be, or at least appears to be, meaningless.

Pantano's recommended approach is to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciate even your failings for what they reveal about yourself and the world. He constructs his argument by summarizing the thoughts of various philosophers and writers, mostly those of a pessimistic temperament (Seneca, Schopenhauer, Cioran, Sartre). Of course he also includes the schools of thought loved by writers of more conventional self-help books: Buddhism, Taoism, and Stoicism.

I generally agree with Pantano's suggested approach to life, and I like his attempt to ground it in the philosophical tradition. I applaud his choice of thinkers, but found most of his summaries too superficial and felt like he always chose the wrong quotes. I also thought he could use an editor; for example, I trip over several phrases in the paragraph quoted above and think it includes too many repeated words.

Hye-Young Pyun, The Hole ***

The Hole presents itself as a horror thriller, with comparisons to Stephen King and Shirley Jackson, but its main strength is as a psychological portrait of a man paralyzed in an accident. The accident killed his wife, and his mother-in-law serves as his caregiver... with questionable intentions. He sometimes feels hopeful about his recovery, sometimes despairing, and he re-evaluates his life choices.

The action and escalating dread are well handled but lack richness. Only the protagonist Oghi gets a name, with other characters being "his wife," "his mother-in-law," "the doctor," and his work colleagues M, S, K, and J. Oghi's life is similarly sketchy:

He'd taken an interest in other work outside of his department that was worth adding to his resume... He put together a research team with funding from a foundation, was on several academic committees... Books he'd published were being selected as recommended reads by different organizations...

I would be much more involved in the story if Pyun had just provided adjectives between "a" and "research team" and "foundation," or named one of the committees or books.

A major thematic element of the story is Oghi's evolving understanding of his wife and their marriage. However, their relationship seems strained from the start.

Dan Richards, Outpost ***

For my 40th birthday, we spent a few days in a cabin on out-of-season Orcas Island. For my 50th, we flew to Fairbanks to see the northern lights. For my 60th, nationwide bad weather kept us at home, so I read Outpost in hopes of vicariously experiencing Dan Richards' visits to "far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts... which have inspired writers, artists, and musicians."

I expected the book to describe the experience of spending time in remote places, but it's actually more of a travel book describing the experience of getting to those places. Richards goes to hiking cabins in Iceland and Scotland, a fire lookout, a lighthouse, a Shinto shrine, and Svalbard. The only locale he talks about spending time at is a writers retreat in Switzerland. The strongest passages are vivid images from along the way, such as this description from riding a ferry as night falls:

I bought a coffee and sat down amongst the diners, all of us gazing at the dark waters and red outlined horizons whilst the ship trembled beneath us. Eventually the windows welled into mirrors and the formica diner fanned out either side like wings spreading into the night.

Outpost is a haphazard collection of stories barely held together by the theme. Even the prose is haphazard, shifting swiftly between poetic natural descriptions and sarcastic asides. Some of the most interesting tidbits are relegated to footnotes, such as the fact that "polar bear hair is actually transparent and not white at all - it's hollow and merely scatters light, making them appear white - their skin is actually black." Reading the book feels like spending time at a bar with a raconteur.

Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle **

The White Castle is an early novel by the Nobel Prize winner Pamuk, his third book but the earliest one translated into English. For mysterious reasons, our local Barnes & Noble store had numerous copies spread across several "featured" tables; it obviously worked, since I purchased one.

A seventeenth-century Venetian is captured by the Turks. He is taken to Istanbul where he becomes the slave of a man who looks very much like him. They work together to influence the young sultan in the direction of science rather than superstition, but whose ideas are whose?

Most of Pamuk's books deal metaphorically with Turkey's twin desires for tradition and modernity, and The White Castle is no exception. (See also Snow and The Museum of Innocence.) This novel is more nakedly parabolical than the others, with no real attempt to flesh out the characters or the setting. 

Despite the book's brevity (161 pages), I found it a slog. The narrator and his master Hoja bicker as their identities s l o w l y intertwine, with no forward motion in the plot. The "twist" ending is telegraphed. All in all, the book felt like Pamuk juvenalia.