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The Return
BOOK OF THE MONTH
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ARCHIVE - THE RETURN: FATHERS, SONS, AND THE LAND IN BETWEEN - DISCUSSION THREAD - (No Spoilers, Please)
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Thank you for the interesting points Connie! Reading together makes you read more than if you read all alone.I guess this is week 4 by now, so I can post my notes of the chapters 8-10.
Chapter 8: The Qaddafi-regime made life almost impossible for its opponents by putting travel bans not only on the opponent himself, but also on his complete family. All male family members (so brothers, cousins, sons) could get no job, no scholarship, so no opportunity to get an education or a living. The regime forced family members to betray their own family. Pretty scary thought, hard to imagine in our hyper individualistic world where we only have to take responsibility for our own acts.
Chapter 9 + 10: The horrors of the Qadaffi-regime, but also what motivated Libyans to stand up against the Qadaffi-regime. Interesting, but also horrific chapters.
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What a horrible regime. You have to wonder why folks want to support such a regime where freedoms are destroyed and their life is held in balance.
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And so we begin:
"The deeper we drove into Benghazi, the more material the world became. We went to Marwan’s house, where we found a large family gathering waiting for us. After lunch, I slipped away on a walk. I felt strong and oddly detached, separate, not what we say sometimes on recounting dreams, “watching myself from the outside,” but so involved that it seemed pointless to be anxious anymore."
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 40). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"The country that separates fathers and sons has disoriented many travelers. It is very easy to get lost here.
Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet, and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift.
They are men, like all men, who have come into the world through another man, a sponsor, opening the gate and, if they are lucky, doing so gently, perhaps with a reassuring smile and an encouraging nudge on the shoulder.
And the fathers must have known, having once themselves been sons, that the ghostly presence of their hand will remain throughout the years, to the end of time, and that no matter what burdens are laid on that shoulder or the number of kisses a lover plants there, perhaps knowingly driven by the secret wish to erase the claim of another, the shoulder will remain forever faithful, remembering that good man’s hand that had ushered them into the world.
To be a man is to be part of this chain of gratitude and remembering, of blame and forgetting, of surrender and rebellion, until a son’s gaze is made so wounded and keen that, on looking back, he sees nothing but shadows.
With every passing day the father journeys further into his night, deeper into the fog, leaving behind remnants of himself and the monumental yet obvious fact, at once frustrating and merciful—for how else is the son to continue living if he must not also forget—that no matter how hard we try we can never entirely know our fathers."
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 51). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"The question of what Father went through during his captivity continues to haunt me.
My mind fixes on the early days, the first few hours. It is as if my imagination, when focused on his life in prison, enters a fog. I am only able to see into a shallow distance. In the first couple of years, the thought alone of what Father was going through restricted me. We were repeatedly warned by the Egyptian authorities—who, to keep us silent, led us to believe that they had him at a secret location on the outskirts of Cairo—that if we campaigned or, in their words, “made too much noise,” it would “complicate the situation.”
We believed them. I was nineteen. I turned into a bridled animal, cautious and quiet. I could not stop thinking of the detestable things that were surely happening to my father as I bathed, as I sat down to eat. I stopped speaking.
I hardly left my London flat except to go to my lectures at the university or to the National Gallery. I flew back to Cairo, and because this was a delayed reaction, more than a year after the event, I had no words to explain it.
I remained indoors for six months. Eventually, passing from one room to the other became a complicated activity. The threshold would begin twisting. I can still see the frame of the arch between the living room and the hall bending maniacally the closer I approached. Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat. Looking out of the window,
I had to make sure my eyes did not land on the wheels of a passing car. The sight of that revolution for a fraction of a second would leave me trembling.
One day, provoked by something my mother or brother had said—the cause remains obscure in my memory—my leg began to repeatedly kick the underside of the table in the kitchen.
The heavy wooden thing kept pulsing up and down, the plates on it jumping and landing nearly, but not quite, where they had been before. Ziad held me and unjustly admonished Mother, “See what you have done?”
He felt responsible for her and me, and I felt responsible for him and her, and she for us all. Each one was parent and child. To make up for the missing pillar, the once balanced structure of four columns was now in perpetual strain."
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 62). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"The guests left. Uncle Mahmoud and I were alone again. His energy picked up. He was playful with his children, laughed loudly at their jokes.
He was quicker than his sons, the first to carry plates back to the kitchen after a meal, the first to detect who was yet to have fruit, bouncing up to hand them the bowl. Only in the background, in some secret compartment of his being, did there seem to be a quiet, resolute withdrawal, a shyness not too unlike that of a believer who, once having had his faith challenged, was now resigned to nursing his convictions in secret.
At times, in mid-conversation, his thoughts brought him to a sudden silence. When the call to prayer was heard, he would take himself to the corner of the room and, without the practice now fashionable across the Arab world of worshippers encouraging others to join them, he would spread a mat and softly conduct his prayers. His posture then—his pencil frame, the boyish agility of his movements—seemed to be an effort against erasure.
It was at once specific yet part of our old human struggle against mortality. It cast a distance between him and the world that, like the fan shape the fisherman’s net leaves when it touches the surface of the water, was only momentarily perceptible.
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 67). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"Amal has become obsessed with Izzo. Nearly every day she posts at least one photograph of her brother on Facebook, pictures made available for anyone to see.
Izzo as a young boy, with eyes curious and shy; Izzo by the sea, the blue pulsing behind him, not minding the wind in his hair, looking at us through a teenager’s face, newly conscious of adulthood yet not quite resigned to it.
Then there are those of Izzo the freedom fighter. These form the majority of the pictures Amal has been posting: tens of photographs taken in the six months he fought in the armed rebellion against the dictatorship.
They show him carrying a Kalashnikov, an RPG, his chest crossed with bullet belts. They show him driving a pickup truck that has lost its doors. Knowing he is being watched, he looks as shy and pensive as a young man off on a trip with people he hardly knows.
Then he is resting on a thin, browned mattress in some bombed-out building, probably in the latter months of the fighting, because beneath the well-worn yellow T-shirt his torso looks more muscular. In another he is standing against a broken-down wall.
The house had been destroyed, but this part of the wall, like a map of an unknown country, stands, persisting. It keeps his shadow. Then there is a series of him showing his wounds: a face freckled by shrapnel, white cotton in the ears, pupils as red as plums.
Over the six months of the war, his expression changes a little. In the early days he has the earnest sense of purpose of those who are anxious to do well.
That keen desire to succeed remains but is gradually erased by a new fatigue that enters the eyes and fastens the eyebrows. A veil of bewilderment has fallen, endured and enduring. Something has changed, and, although perhaps it won’t last forever, it seems limitless.
Looking at these pictures, I hear his voice repeat, “Is it too late? Perhaps it is too late,” and I know that what he means has nothing to do with retreating but is a response to the nature of war, the momentum sustained by conflict.
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 76). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"A month later, Izzo and Marwan were amongst a small group of revolutionaries who traveled the 55-kilometre journey from Misrata and slipped into Zliten.
There is a video that was shot on Izzo’s mobile phone on the 12th of July, which happened to be Marwan’s thirtieth birthday. The camera shakes. It stops on a view of marble steps and a wrought-iron balustrade—ornate, copying some distant European staircase. Izzo adjusts the zoom.
For a moment his finger is pressed against the glass of the lens. The blood-filled flesh lights up a luminous pink. It reminds me of when, as a child, I used to lock myself in the cupboard and press a torch against my palm, marveling, with horror and curiosity, at the mysterious web of veins, the opaque sticks of bone.
There is the echo of a distant gunshot, then another. Izzo’s finger moves out of the frame and we see the ceiling, dotted in a line of spotlights. “Are you filming?” Marwan whispers.
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 85). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"We stood outside Uncle Mahmoud’s house in the evening sun and said goodbye. I promised to be back in a few days. I wondered if I was being taken for a shy swimmer who plunges into the river, then gets out immediately.
Guilt is exile’s eternal companion. It stains every departure. The excuse—for there must always be an excuse—was that I was obliged to visit other relatives in Benghazi. We set off."
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 92). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
The following day I met more relations. It was odd to be with people I half remembered.
At the least-expected moment, I would suddenly recognize the shape of a neck, an expression in the eyes, an intonation in the voice.
Somebody would be telling an anecdote and midway through I would realize I had heard it before. It seemed as if everyone else’s development had been linear, allowed to progress naturally in the known environment, and therefore each of them seemed to have remained linked, even if begrudgingly or in disagreement, to the original setting-off point.
At times I was experiencing a kind of distance-sickness, a state in which not only the ground was unsteady but also time and space. The only other individuals I met who seemed afflicted by a similar condition were ex-prisoners.
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 103). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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And so we begin:
"Word of the event got around. The car park surrounding the library was almost full by the time Mother, Diana and I arrived. The building had the air of an abandoned structure.
The floor of the car park was covered in the tiles so commonly found in the southern Mediterranean, made up of broken pieces of marble and other stones set in resin. It was the wrong choice. It was designed for interiors.
The relentless assault of the sun and the weight of the cars had cracked it in several places. Weeds and grass shot through the gaps. Up a few steps and we were inside the foyer. There wasn’t a book in sight, and even the index-card drawers were empty.
I wasn’t able to go up to the other floors, but, judging from the ground floor, the library had been empty and closed for years. The vertical blinds that hung against the windows were bent out of shape, and several of their long strips were missing.
Matar, Hisham. The Return (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (p. 113). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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Week Six
14. The Bullet - page 122
15. Maximilian - page 144
16. The Campaign - page 159
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Message 43 has the chapter overviews and summaries for Chapters 5 - 7
Chapter Eight - The Truce and the Clementine
Hisham spends time with his Uncle Mahmoud. He remembers a football match that took place on September 13th, 1989 - exactly six months before the two brothers were imprisoned. Izzo is also separated from his father.
Chapter Nine - The Old Man and His Son
Amal posts photographs of her brother Izzo on Facebook. Izzo studied to become a civil engineer. The resistance fought Qaddafi.
Chapter Ten - The Flag
Izzo and Marwan traveled 55 kilometers from Mistra to Zliten. Marwan is shot at 13. Izzo died. Hamed wanted to fight the resistance too.
Chapter Eleven - The Last Light
The author leaves his Uncle Mahmoud's house and feels guilty. On the trip to Benghazi, the author realizes that he has been carrying Libya in his heart as well as the child he once was. He met his cousin Marwan al-Tashani. And a flashback to Zaid's wedding.
Chapter Twelve - Benghazi
Hisham meets more relatives in Benghazi. The author reflects on the many cultural influences that are depicted in Benghazi. He met Maher.
Chapter Thirteen - Another Life
Some of his father's friends arrived and Diana was surrounded by several of the author's cousins. One of his friends showed Hamid two short stories by his father which neither Hisham nor his mother knew anything about. In the photo, he looked like a young Albert Camus. Several of the people who had assembled wanted to impart some information about Hisham's father or grandfather. The thirty three years that troubled the author also troubled them. One man spoke of Hisham's mother - Fawzia Tarbeh and it looked like Hisham's mother was about to cry.
Chapter Fourteen - The Bullet
Hisham had problems sleeping. He decides to read the second story that his father had written. The stories were a profound discovery. They were a gift sent back in time. He reflected on he life of his grandfather.
Chapter Fifteen - Maximilian
Hisham admits that not knowing when his father ceased to exist has further complicated the boundary between life and death. to Hisham - his father is both dead and alive. Hisham returned from Libya and had to go to Rome because he wanted to see the exhibit of Titian and others. There is a flashback to the prison - Abu Salim. Hisham Matar has read every account about the prison. Hisham met one of the former prisoners in a cafe in London. He saw Hisham's father only from a distance.
Chapter Sixteen - The Campaign
Hisham has searched for his father and hope has been seeping out of him. The massacre had taken place in 1996 but one political prisoner stated that they saw his father in 2002. The family filed a formal request to find out what happened.
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Bentley wrote: "Awards:WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing—one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year, w..."
Definately one I shall be reading!
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Bentley wrote: "Welcome Karen - glad that you are joining in. I look forward to reading your posts."Thank you! Very kind
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Thank you. I'm new to communities on Goodreads and don't really know how they work so bear with me while I find my way around :)
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Welcome Karen! Chapter 11-13: what touched me was the enormous hunger for uncensored news and literature in Libya shortly after the revolution. A free press is so important!
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A free press is what makes a democracy open and informed. When you do not have one - your view of the world is closed and limited. Libya has had such a trying past - and you often wonder how long it will take a country to overcome such instability. When I think of Syria and the poor Syrian people for example - I do not think that Syria will ever recover. Of course, we all hope we are wrong.
I lost track of where we are in the reading schedule. I finished the book some weeks ago. I post my thoughts on the book as a whole as a spoiler.(view spoiler)
Thanks for picking this book as a BotM. I would never picked it by myself.
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I am sure that Matar has suffered immensely with the loss of his father as did the rest of the family too.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The City Always Wins (other topics)Anatomy of a Disappearance (other topics)
In the Country of Men (other topics)
The Return (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Omar Robert Hamilton (other topics)Hisham Matar (other topics)
Hisham Matar (other topics)
Chapter 8-page 68: Hashim tells how Qaddafi's regime uses a favorite tactic of dictators by punishing the families of dissidents:
"The Libyan regime had forbidden nearly all of my father's family from traveling outside the country. It was one of several tactics the authorities employed to punish my father and, by extension, his family. On account of Father's politics, it was almost impossible for any male member of my paternal family (except for the odd exception who was loyal to the regime) to gain employment or receive a scholarship....Not wishing to strengthen the association and cause them more problems, we did not call or write to members of our paternal family."