Hisham Matar has spent most of his life in the UK. Born in New York, he lived in exile in Cairo, where his father, Jaballa, a businessman of means, took his young family to escape active persecution by Col Gadafy in Libya. Matar’s father had been a linchpin around which Libya’s educated and liberal middle-class opposition turned, which ultimately saw him confined to a cell in the regime’s most notorious prison, Abu Salim. Jaballa Matar reached for and took comfort in literature throughout his years of imprisonment; so, too, does his son as he unearths broken, partial truths about his father’s time at Abu Salim and the likely circumstances of his death. The author here leans on Kafka, Telemachus, Proust, but it is through the gentle sweep of Matar’s own writing that the well-worn themes of fathers and sons, land, exile and freedom create the featherweight structure of this lyrical memoir. The enormity of the story being told about this one abduction, imprisonment and presumed murder is harrowing enough as deeply personal family history, and more powerful still when extrapolated across an entire nation.
