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.
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