From the author of In the Country of Men, a Man Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, comes a beautifully written, uplifting memoir of his journey home to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s disappearance.
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime’s most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. “Hope,” as he writes, “is cunning and persistent.”
Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells are empty and there is no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returns with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he’d go back to again. The Return is the story of what he found there. It is at once an exquisite meditation on history, politics, and art, a brilliant portrait of a nation and a people on the cusp of change, and a disquieting depiction of the brutal legacy of absolute power. Above all, it is a universal tale of loss and love and of one family’s life. Hisham Matar asks the harrowing question: How does one go on living in the face of a loved one’s uncertain fate?
##对政局,动荡和死亡有思考,但是并没有引起我这样一个中国大陆读者的共鸣。
评分##对政局,动荡和死亡有思考,但是并没有引起我这样一个中国大陆读者的共鸣。
评分##2017年传记类普利策奖获奖作品。作者用不长的篇幅,娓娓讲述了自己家族随着利比亚近百年国族命运沉浮的历史:从意大利的侵略和殖民,到对上校政权的拥护,失望与反抗,直至茉莉花风暴席卷下的革命。作者的叙述少有激昂之处,但是处处都饱浸着他对彼人彼土的深沉感情。尤其是在父亲这条主线上,透过平实质朴的文字,读者可以真切感受到一个残缺的灵魂在放弃和希望间挣扎撕扯的切肤之痛 - "Certainty is better than hope." "As long as he is not home, he is unknown everywhere".
评分##R4 read by Khalid Abdalla. NY-- Tripoli, Libya-- Cairo--London
评分##死者仍然和我们共同活在这个世界上,我们的悲痛,不过是为了应对身体上的死亡。时间与空间都是无限的,生命不是一次性的事件,因此“他已经死了”这样的宣布是不准确的。
评分##一段也许永远都无法解开的死亡之谜,一个家族几代人对暴政的抗争,一个国家动乱的近现代史
评分##冒昧地问一句,作者这样背景的人,对“故乡”的情感到底是怎么建立起来的?我觉得我和他无法共情。。。
评分##已阅
评分##逝者已逝。活着的人,言道其尚存,这般关于死的感受性描述,充其量只是亲人的placebo,无益于我们对死的理解。当然,我赞成作者关于人在时间与空间序列上对他人的影响的判断——生命是河,每个人都是过客,但过客值得纪念与缅怀的地方,恰恰在于曾让这条河激荡起涟漪,泛起过浪花。承认父亲仍然尚在人间,对我们这些旁观者而言,实在无足轻重,个人的歇斯底里不足为外人道。但回来本身,是富有象征意义的。年龄越大,越会发觉生命是个轮回,那种超脱规律与生命进程的“失控”是很少的,甚至在一个更绵长的时间范畴中,都是某种重复。拒绝与卡扎菲儿子的媾和,这样的政治合作可以再进一步拓展。
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