The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between

Very good books. Easy arrival. Thanks

very good book

In a war-torned country, a son hopes against all hopes to find his father who is captured and kept in a secret location. As Hisham fights his demons, he makes us look at how unpredictable and unfair the life can be amidst conflict. A very decent book, with facts weaved in seamlessly, it still very bizarrely and conveniently ignores the role of women in a revolution. At the end, you walk away with a feeling that there could have been so much more to the story, especially more on how humanity suffers at the hands of power hungry people. I would rather recommend Istanbul Istanbul as it brings alive the human sacrifice in the face of greater good rather craftily.

Book was awesome, very aweful delivery

A well written book about the deepest love and loss a person can bear. Worth a read for sure

That it is a true story - makes it that much alluring and chilling. An amazing gift of weaving in and out of events. Remarkable resilience both By the father and the son.

Among the most beautifully written and elegiac of memoirs that I have ever read. A tale of memories and places connected with family - grand-fathers and fathers - uncles and cousins - in exile and incarcerated in the prisons of invaders and of dictators. Torture mixed with searching - smuggled letters and whispers of sightings - oh weep for Libya and the interference of selfish vested interests! Hisham MATAR tells the story of too many of us - of suffering in our own lands -and of dispersal to the world. I write this brief review in Australia where a banal-looking self-described "democratic" government locks up asylum-seekers fleeing despots - then tortures them in off-shore island gulags - unto death - while bleating about keeping the citizens safe with strong border controls. Hideous! Beyond hideous. Our Quaddafi goes under various names - including those of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Dutton - among others. This books shines a spotlight on dictatorships in general. Thank you Hisham MATAR!

Privileged access into the psyche of the son of a Libyan political dissident, who strives to come to terms with the fact that his father - who was arrested without warning during the author's childhood - was probably killed in a State authorised massacre whilst a political prisoner in Libya's most infamous prison. At times this was a desperately sad read. It reminded me, in parts, of the narratives of Auschwitz survivors and religiously affiliated prisoners of the former Eastern Bloc Communist regimes. Overall this was a book that made me commit - emotionally, practically and financially - to the promotion of universal human rights; and not many books in my experience have made such an impression.

I think I enjoyed this book but I don't remember to develop more, sorry!

Hisham Matar’s, The Return, is neither a straightforward autobiography, nor a neat chronicle of Libya under tyranny. It merits reading for two reasons. First, it does provide detailed sketches of what life was like under Gaddafi. Second, it is a testament to the power of a son’s love for his father. I’m going to focus on the former. Libya, for good or ill, is not much written about in the United States and, when it is mentioned, the news is almost always bad, if not tragic. First and foremost, there’s Lockerbie, and more recently, the fact that a former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been charged with taking funds from Libya in exchange for political favors.) There can be no doubt that Libyans suffered under a tyrannical regime while Gaddafi ruled. One of the great attributes of Mr. Matar’s text is that he takes readers deep inside the fascist state and exposes its many crimes. Surely, one of the saddest stories I’ve read anywhere is Matar’s account of a mother who, every year for five years, visited the prison in Tripoli where she understood her son to be held. She was never permitted to see her son, but the guards assured her that the meals she cooked and the gifts she brought would be delivered to him. Without fail, they encouraged her to return and wished her better luck next time. And, return she did, year after year, not knowing that her son had been dead all those years. Matar has a great eye for detail and a novelist’s ability to capture that detail in prose. In my experience, books like this don’t come around that often. Readers ought to take advantage of it.

Adorei o livro. Conciso, preciso, rico, tocante, realista. Expõe os sentimentos humanos, o que é importante, em construções imagéticas que tocam profundamente nossa alma..