Hisham Matar, author of The Return, continues his description of the year after his father had been kidnapped by Qaddafi’s supporters, when the family didn’t know whether the father was dead or alive. “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.” The precision of his descriptions of complex feelings and remote places help this remarkable book blur the lines between fiction, poetry, biography and memoir.
Matar, Hisham. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between. Random House, 2016, p. 63.