The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Novelist Matar's (In the Country of Men) debut memoir is elegant in its style and refined in its thinking. This is all the more notable since the subject is so ugly: the disappearance of his father, Jaballah, at the hands of the Libyan regime led by Muammar al-Qaddafi. Though other members of Matar's family also went missing, Jaballah is the only one who never returned, and this book sets out to investigate why. Along the way we learn a lot about Libya's very complicated colonial history, and much about Libyan exile life in Cairo. Disappointingly, we don't learn enough about the author's relationship with his father. He clearly loved and revered him and, understandably, misses him deeply. But what was their relationship actually like? What kind of person was Jaballah? We almost get more information about Matar's various disappeared uncles and cousins. Perhaps this is deliberate, that Matar turns his father into a ghost to get readers to experience what having someone just disappear really feels like.