This is the second book on the reading list from the course on creative non-fiction that our friend’s son teaches at Loyola, and like the other book,  ‘The Gallery of Clouds’, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

Matar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his memoir, ‘The Return’, describes his eponymous experience in prose that is both beautifully wrought and precise.  Born in the US to Libyan parents and raised in Tripoli and Cairo, he describes his deep interest in Siena’s 13th C painters and spends a month there exploring their work and his experience with art, writing, solitude, and creating the narrative of his life.  He writes “And here was my solitude, as quick and thick and heavy as always. It was temporally rich, as though when one is alone time becomes a room with double windows: one looking into the past, the other into the future. The historian’s temptation is to capture the uncertain past, to contain and divide it into chapters, ages, and epochs, to organize and tell the story coherently, to locate and make an inventory of its motives and outcomes. And we are, of course, each one of us, the historian of our own lives.”  

That brief quote will give you an idea of the depth of the insights and the beauty of the prose.  Matar turns his mind and his hand to exploring the ability of art and especially the paintings of Duccio and the two  Lorenzettis which are still in Siena to ‘play out the human spirit’s hope’.  He writes “Lorenzetti’s ‘Allegory’ (which he spends many pages analyzing figure by figure) and Caravaggio’s ‘David’ and indeed the entire history of art can be read as that: a gesture of hope and also of desire, a playing out of the human spirit’s secret ambition to connect with the beloved, to see the world through her eyes, to traverse that tragic private distance between intention and utterance, so that finally, we might be truly comprehended, and to do this not in order to advocate a position but rather to be truly seen, to be recognized, not to be mistaken for someone else, to go on changing while remaining identifiable by those who know us best.” 

I always read with pencil and paper at hand to jot down quotes, ideas, and important points, and occasionally there is a very special book where I notice part way through that I am copying down or noting the page number of almost everything I’ve read.  Such was my experience with Matar’s book.  It’s simply spell-binding, beautiful, and filled with insight.  I urge you to read it.  At 127 pages with fine color reproductions of the paintings he cites, this is a book that you should savor slowly and deeply.