with endless rooms, inescapable and haunted.” hi

This latter, unpredictable narrative also probes how Jaballa’s absence shaped his son. By the time he had reached his 30s, far from sublimating such rage and hatred into fine, if narrowly themed fiction, Matar was making scant headway on his first novel. In fact, he had come perilously close to allowing his inner demons to consume him. So much so, he writes, that “I found myself standing at the edge of the Pont d’Arcole (a bridge over the Seine River) in Paris, staring into the green rushing waters below” – and contemplating suicide. The portion of The Return that resembles a detective story begins with an unexpected revelation. “It was clear that he had been shot or hanged or starved or tortured to death,” Matar writes of his father in the very first chapter. He discovered as much during the Libyan revolution in 2011, when rebels broke into the notorious Abu Salim prison complex – from which Jaballa had smuggled out three letters in the mid-1990s – and set the inmates free. Jaballa was not among them.