Author:: Hisham Matar Tags: historical nonfiction#media/book Link:: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28007895-the-return
- themes::
- feeling uncomfortable being separated from homeland, anxiety of being an outsider upon returning but also a deep-seated feeling of home even after being away for so long
- family story
- very artistic, poetic, flowy
- vivid concrete and oddly specific images to describe feelings with such intense imagery beyond the basic feelings
- really highlights the nuance in feelings
- quotes
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“Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
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“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
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He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
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“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion[*](> “Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
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“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
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He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
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“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion [*](> “Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
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“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
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He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
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“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion*
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“Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
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“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
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He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
-
“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion[*](> “Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
-
“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
-
He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
-
“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion [*](> “Hamza followed me. I remember our parallel images in the mirror as we stood washing hands. We embraced. “Man,” he said, “I’m going to miss you.” I remember the shape of his ear, how my eyes focused on it. I said the words as though involuntarily:
-
“Hamza, I am Libyan. My name is Hisham Matar. I’m the son of Jaballa Matar.”
-
He didn’t let go. I felt his body become rigid.
-
“I am sorry,” I said. I was not sure what exactly I was apologizing for.” p19 imagery emotion*
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“Water running in rivers, or lingering in drops on leaves, making the air sharp and damp” imagery pg 20
- interesting adjective choice
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“Naked adoption of native mannerisms or the local dialect—this has always seemed to me a kind of humiliation. And yet, like a jealous lover, I believed I knew London’s secrets better than most of its natives.” pg 23
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“There is a moment when you realize that you and your parent are not the same person, and it usually occurs when you are both consumed by a similar passion” pg 37
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“When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. I am clutching at the walls. They are rough and unreliable, made of soft clay that flakes off int he rain.” pg 43 imagery
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“Over the six months of 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” imagery pg 77
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“It is timeless and unique to Benghazi. It is perhaps the most important architectural material there is, more than stone. It is light. The Benghazi light is a material. You can almost feel its weight, the way it falls and holds its subject.” imagery pg 108
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“home as a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible?” pg 110
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“A truth seemed to rise up in the dark. The noises of Benghazi, the sea murmuring beyond, came through the window as thought they were solid physical shapes. The night had turned the city into an idea whose sounds were as material as bread and stone. I had never been anywhere so burdened with memories yet also so charged with possibilities for the future, positive and negative, and each just as potent and probable as the other. The entire country was poised on a knife-edge. In less than two years, the streets of downtown Benghazi, around the hotel where I lay staring into the ceiling, would become a battleground. The buildings, now occupied with families and their secrets, would stand as ghostly skeletons, charred and empty.” imagery pg 122 favepassages
- wow
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“The trend of silence continued. Even today, to be Libyan is to live with questions.” pg 131
- unknown unclear past
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“Our gaze was so determined we could hardly see. Like figures moving in a fog. And each one of us worried about losing the others. But grief is a divider; it moved each one of us into a territory of private shadows, where the torment was incommunicable, so horribly outside of language.” pg 152 imagery
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“Today, whenever I see a Manet, the white, his white, which is unlike any other white, cannot be a cloud, a tablecloth or a woman’s dress but will always remain the white leather belts of the firing squad in The Execution of Maximilian” imagery pg 158
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“One of the injustices involved in disappearing a person is a difficult one to describe. It turns the disappeared into an abstraction, and, because the possibility of his existing under the same sun and the same moon is a real one, it makes it hard to retain a clear picture of him. In death the hallmark fades, and not all the memorials in the world can hold back the tide of forgetting. but in life the disappeared changes in ways that are active and elaborate.” imagery pg 163 favepassages
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“But in a life of activity, one free from dramatic rupture, where the progress of things is unbroken by catastrophe, where the skin of our thoughts is regularly touched by new impressions, discoveries and influences, our maturation comes to follow a gradient that creates the illusion of a seamless line. With Uncle Hmad, the young man he was at the point of his arrest and the man he has become seemed to exist in parallel, destined never to meet and yet resonating against one another like two discordant muscial notes.” -p233 imagery ^w3NCvjb5c
- quarantine
- broken lines
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I am nowhere near as thoughtful, yet I find it impossible to be “myself” in the company of others. I am constantly thinking about those around me. If I like them, my opinions sway in their direction, and if for whatever reason they irritate me, I am willfully obstinate. Either way, I am left weary and unclear, regretting ever having relinquished my solitude, and, because I desire the company of others and always have, the cycle is endless. pg 224
- literally me
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They wanted to bring me into the darkness, to expose the suffering and, in doing so, discretely and indirectly emphasize the bitter and momentous achievement of having survived it. Is there an achievement greater than surviving suffering? Of coming through mostly intact? And I sensed enjoyment in their telling, in having the savage horror of their time in prison—a period covering between one third to one hold of each man’s life so far— sit side by side with the genetleness of a liberal afternoon with tea and cigarettes pg 225 imagery emotion
- paradoxical almost sadistical
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As long as Odysseus is lost, Telemachus cannot leave home. as long as Odysseus is not home, he is everywhere unknown. pg 236
- state of no change, locked in time because something is not normal
- being stuck
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