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cdubbub's review against another edition
4.0
Moving and disturbing account of a son trying to discover the truth of his father’s kidnapping and time spent as a political prisoner in Libya. Combining the facts about Qaddafi’s horrific regime, and his feelings of loss and desperation, it’s an important yet heartbreaking read.
nzagalo's review against another edition
3.0
"O Regresso" (2016) de Hisham Matar é um livro autobiográfico com um fundo histórico internacional, pelo que nunca seria uma perda de tempo por tudo o que aqui podemos aprender, mais ainda quando essa história é distante da nossa, ou pouca reconhecida internacionalmente como é o caso da história da criação da Líbia moderna, no século XX, com a invasão e genocídio levado a cabo por Itália que levaria depois ao poder um dos mais inumanos ditadores desse século, Khadafi.
Continua com excertos no Nx: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2024/07/o-regresso-2016.html
Continua com excertos no Nx: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2024/07/o-regresso-2016.html
astridandlouise's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.0
marksid's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
4.0
mlayden's review against another edition
4.0
I finished reading this at the same time as I’ve been listening to the audiobook “The Panama Papers”. Two very very different book s and yet they have combined in my thinking. The Panama papers reveal the whole sick financial and legal system that allows so many dictators, corporations, politicians etc to remove themselves from any basic requirements of decency and obligation to the people around them.
One of the groups of shell companies that the PPs revealed were those used by Gaddafis inner circle, This becomes little more than just another shady deal, bad but not emotionally engaging.
In Hisham Matars book you spend time with a family stuck in a dark violent Limbo, stuck between a receding dream world and a future world of haunting potential. But for me the horror of Gaddafis regime is not the torturers and pr men but the characters in all the little faceless offices worldwide who move the blood soaked cash through a myriad of shell companies so that the forces of evil can keep their toys and wealth while keeping their prisons going.
Books like the return are needed tp haunt the soul and feel anguish. We need to have both emotional understanding of the reality of dictatorship to understand why offshore banking is a plaque.
One of the groups of shell companies that the PPs revealed were those used by Gaddafis inner circle, This becomes little more than just another shady deal, bad but not emotionally engaging.
In Hisham Matars book you spend time with a family stuck in a dark violent Limbo, stuck between a receding dream world and a future world of haunting potential. But for me the horror of Gaddafis regime is not the torturers and pr men but the characters in all the little faceless offices worldwide who move the blood soaked cash through a myriad of shell companies so that the forces of evil can keep their toys and wealth while keeping their prisons going.
Books like the return are needed tp haunt the soul and feel anguish. We need to have both emotional understanding of the reality of dictatorship to understand why offshore banking is a plaque.
amyjo25's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Violence
quaintmetropolis's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
3.75
Hisham Matar’s lyrical memoir centers around a return trip he takes with his wife and mother in 2012 to his native Libya. There, he searches for answers to the 1990 kidnapping of his dissident father, Jaballa Matar, by Muammar Gaddafi’s tyrannical regime. Matar attempts to rationalize maddeningly futile meetings with Gaddafi agents (Gaddafi’s own son included) while grappling with personal questions of identity—his own, as an exile, and Libya’s fraught history of colonialism and dictatorship. He weaves in and out of his return visit with flashes of his past, he and his family haunted by his father’s ghost.
Matar claims that he’s “not a man of action” like his radical father, who’s presence while in Hisham’s life was a major weight. As a child growing up in a foreign land with dissident figures in his home continually speaking emphatically about change, he felt drowned without the space to come into his own. Matar is not a journalist or a frontline political activist; he’s a writer, and primarily a writer of fiction at that, flung into a political situation he feels ill-equipped to navigate. Matar has also said in interviews, “political oppression [narrows] the imagination.” This is how he uses his talents to unveil injustice. The pages are steeped in comparisons to literary characters in an attempt to contextualize his loss. He manages to take a large-scale issue and turn it into an intimate, poignant family portrayal.
I found The Return incredibly powerful and readable. Though, I suspect I would have gotten more out of it and sat with it longer if I had read it on the page instead. I will have to go back to it in the future.
dclark32's review against another edition
5.0
A couple weeks ago I was teaching a lesson to my grade 10's about the notorious "triangle trade", which once saw a round trip trading voyage bringing slaves from Africa to the Americas, cotton from the Americas to Europe, and finished goods back around to Africa. For a bunch of kids in rural Newfoundland, my diagram was nothing more than lines on a map, and the lesson was just another thing their teacher wanted them to know. The full meaning of a slave as a person owned as a property was lost on them. To bridge the knowledge gap, I had students read a short excerpt from Greg Grandin's The Empire of Necessity, detailing the experience of slaves aboard ship on the horrific Middle Passage. That did the trick, and students came up to me afterwards to express their shock at the discovery.
Hisham Matar's stunning memoir The Return fulfills a similar need for me to what Empire of Necessity did for my students: it brings to life a chapter that the media had previously caused me to perceive from a distance. Prior to reading this book, Libya was a place that NATO had bombed a decade ago, and that was about as far as my understanding extended. Here is a magnificently detailed portrait of a people and a nation struggling against the crushing oppression of a brutal dictator, seen through the eyes of one prominent family. Matar's quest to discover what happened to his father, the dissident, after his kidnapping brings the reader face to face with the horrors of Abu Salim prison. We see a dictator who is coddled and enabled by the British government and other members of NATO, but they are not alone; I was shocked by the heartless response of Nelson Mandela in response to the entreaties of the exiled Hisham. Meanwhile, even in exile, Matar's family tries to maintain maximal pressure on the Qaddafi regime, at great personal risk. In its clear-eyed account of abused power, I found myself reminded of Orwell. If Matar doesn't quite match that great writer's concision, he makes up for it with emotion and soul-baring honesty.
It is these qualities that elevate The Return from a good book to a great one. In spare but vivid prose, paired with a narrative that rumbles down the tracks, Matar has written a beautiful and loving tribute to his father and his family. Their dedication to each other and to their country leaps off the page, to be knitted into the fabric of eternity. Matar describes the pain of being separated from all the he loves, living in a land that is not his own, powerless to save his father. It is at this level, of a universally recognizable love and of personal struggle, that the book transcends its vehicle of the political memoir. I do not say this very often but: here is a classic.
5/5
Hisham Matar's stunning memoir The Return fulfills a similar need for me to what Empire of Necessity did for my students: it brings to life a chapter that the media had previously caused me to perceive from a distance. Prior to reading this book, Libya was a place that NATO had bombed a decade ago, and that was about as far as my understanding extended. Here is a magnificently detailed portrait of a people and a nation struggling against the crushing oppression of a brutal dictator, seen through the eyes of one prominent family. Matar's quest to discover what happened to his father, the dissident, after his kidnapping brings the reader face to face with the horrors of Abu Salim prison. We see a dictator who is coddled and enabled by the British government and other members of NATO, but they are not alone; I was shocked by the heartless response of Nelson Mandela in response to the entreaties of the exiled Hisham. Meanwhile, even in exile, Matar's family tries to maintain maximal pressure on the Qaddafi regime, at great personal risk. In its clear-eyed account of abused power, I found myself reminded of Orwell. If Matar doesn't quite match that great writer's concision, he makes up for it with emotion and soul-baring honesty.
It is these qualities that elevate The Return from a good book to a great one. In spare but vivid prose, paired with a narrative that rumbles down the tracks, Matar has written a beautiful and loving tribute to his father and his family. Their dedication to each other and to their country leaps off the page, to be knitted into the fabric of eternity. Matar describes the pain of being separated from all the he loves, living in a land that is not his own, powerless to save his father. It is at this level, of a universally recognizable love and of personal struggle, that the book transcends its vehicle of the political memoir. I do not say this very often but: here is a classic.
5/5