The Return

The Return is Hisham Matar's 2016 memoir, the Pulitzer Prize winner of 2017 and Matar's structural late-career narrative non-fiction work that gave the broader American literary readership the personal-and-political-historical material that the earlier novels (In the Country of Men 2006, Anatomy of a Disappearance 2011) had been writing around. The structural premise is Matar's 2012 return to Libya — after thirty-three years of exile from his Tripoli childhood and the broader Libyan opposition family-and-political context — to investigate the 1990 Cairo kidnapping of his father Jaballa Matar, the senior Libyan opposition leader who was lured to Cairo by an Egyptian intelligence officer and rendered to the Libyan Mukhabarat secret police. Jaballa Matar was held at the Tripoli Abu Salim prison through approximately 1996 (when most Abu Salim prisoners were massacred in a single June 1996 day) and the question of whether he survived the June 1996 massacre is the structural mystery the entire memoir works through.

Matar's structural method is the patient close-first-person memoir construction across the 2012 return trip and the broader Matar-family-historical material that the trip's investigations open up. The Tripoli-and-Ajdabiya chapters of the return trip carry the structural emotional weight; the broader Matar-family-historical chapters (Jaballa's biographical arc, the broader Libyan opposition political context, the 1996 Abu Salim massacre material) provide the structural political-historical scaffolding that the memoir's broader argument depends on. The Mahmoud-Matar-cousin-correspondence chapters in the middle third are some of the strongest contemporary American literary memoir prose about a specific kind of long-duration political-exile inheritance. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of long-duration political exile and the specific search for an absent disappeared parent across the decades that follow produce a specific kind of moral inheritance that the broader American literary memoir tradition has not historically committed to) is made through the texture of the return-trip chapters rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American memoir reading, as the right Matar entry point alongside My Friends (2024), and as one of the canonical contemporary American memoirs on political exile and the search for a disappeared parent. Compare to Solito (Javier Zamora), Born a Crime (Trevor Noah), Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner), and contemporary American memoir. The Hisham Matar audiobook (author-narrated) is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.