The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
by Hisham Matar
Summary
This is Hisham Matar's own account of returning to Libya in 2012, after decades away, to search for the truth about his father Jaballa Matar, a Libyan dissident abducted from exile in Cairo in 1990 and disappeared into Muammar Gaddafi's prison system. Matar was born in New York in 1970 while his father served at Libya's mission to the United Nations, and he tells the story of a family that fled Libya for Cairo when he was nine, then of the two letters in his father's handwriting that reached the family in 1996, saying he had been seized by Egyptian secret police, handed to the Libyan regime and imprisoned in Abu Salim, the last confirmed word the family ever received from him.
The memoir follows Matar back into a country only just emerging from Gaddafi's fall, reuniting with relatives he had not seen in decades and confronting officials and former prisoners who might know what happened to his father inside Abu Salim, where he was last held. He writes as both son and novelist, having already published two novels, In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance, that circled the same loss from a fictional distance before he finally wrote the true story directly.
Matar writes in short, exact chapters that move between present day Libya and memory without warning, and reading the book means sitting inside a genuinely unresolved grief, since the memoir does not end with confirmation of what happened to his father. It suits a reader who wants exile, political disappearance and a son's specific, decades long unanswered question rendered with restraint rather than melodrama, the book closing without the resolution its own search never found.
Historical Context & Significance
The Return won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography as well as the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and France's Prix du Livre Étranger, an unusually wide international reach for a memoir written in English by an author raised largely in exile.
Matar's father Jaballa was a prominent opponent of the Gaddafi government, and the memoir's account of his 1990 kidnapping by Egyptian secret police and transfer into Libyan custody gave English language readers one of the fullest personal accounts of what Gaddafi's prison system did to families like Matar's. The book has been read widely as a document of the wider human cost behind Libya's decades under Gaddafi, arriving just as the country itself was descending into the civil conflict that followed his fall. That year's finalists were Susan Faludi's In the Darkroom and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air.