The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

by Hisham Matar

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.”

go out to the garden, even after lunch, when the sun was merciless and the household napped.

Father’s literary memory was like a floating library. It would have been unusual for him not to be able to recall at least one poem by every significant Arabic poet from the modern era.

Father sought refuge in the elegiac Bedouin poetry of the alam.

Outside of school, I read only poetry. I had only begun to read fiction in my spare time when I was nineteen—in

I thought, for men like him, the world must seem an amusing affair.

They were so close, I remember thinking, that they could do this, they could be upset at each other and could just leave it at that. When you live together in the same room you can leave it at that, but in a world where anything can happen, and where the distances are forever stretching, we must try to make amends at the very first opportunity.