From Tripoli to Tuscany: Libyan writer Hisham Matar finds new connections between art and life

Hisham Matar's award-winning novels are haunted by his experience of loss and displacement. Although his family managed to flee Libya when he was a child, his politically active father was later abducted and imprisoned by the Gadhafi dictatorship.

Thirty-three years later, Matar returned to Libya to try to discover the truth behind his father's disappearance. He describes that journey in his compelling, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, The Return.

Matar's new book, A Month in Siena, traces his more recent journey to a very different place. It's an exquisite meditation on the relationship between history and art, grief and consolation. 

Matar spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from London.

Places I remember

"I am curious about trying to write about a place. I think places, and the way the weather, the architecture and the landscape can be used to communicate so much else beyond itself — that has always intrigued me as a reader.

"It also comes from the fact that, for whatever reason, I have always been alive to places. It's such a curious mystery that places invite or excite in us different things. We're not always the same in every place."

A gift from my father

"My father never said it, but he behaved in a way that always made me think that what I was feeling and thinking was worthwhile, unique and of high value. He made me feel special in that way. My father made me feel that I was interesting without indulging me. He saw something in me.

My father made me feel that I was interesting without indulging me. He saw something in me.- Hisham Matar

"Most of us, if not all of us, ride on myths of the self and myths of everything else. But that's very powerful. It really gets to you. I wonder whether he was what he most probably was — which is a biased, loving father — or whether he actually did see something.

"That's a lovely thing to leave somebody with. I have a very tender and sympathetic place in my heart for the opposite, for people I know very well whose fathers left them with the burden of disapproval or unfair criticism."

Viewing habits

"I've always enjoyed going to museums and looking at paintings. Art has always been a part of my life. When I was 19 — which is when I lost my father — in London I lived very close to the National Gallery. It is free to enter and as a student I had no money. So this allowed me to go regularly.

"But I found it overwhelming. I couldn't do what most people do, where you quickly go from one picture to the next, finish in an hour and go have a cup of tea. I find that very difficult to do. I couldn't square my desire to see paintings with my inability to see them in this way.

I've always enjoyed going to museums and looking at paintings. Art has always been a part of my life.- Hisham Matar

"I decided that I would look at one painting only for about 15 minutes and then leave. Because I lived close to the museum, I could go every day on my lunch hour.

"I would do that for the whole week with one picture and then I'd switch. It has become a lifelong habit and I still do it."

A fateful day

"In 1996, on the day of the massacre in the political prison that my father was held in — and on the likely day he died —  I found in my diary an entry for that date. The entry reads something to this effect: 'I couldn't get up till noon. Going back to the National Gallery. I think I'm done with the Velázquez and I will turn to The Execution of Maximilian by Manet.' If you had to choose one painting in the National Gallery that would evoke the inconclusive fate of the men that died that day, that would be the painting. 

In 1996, on the day of the massacre in the political prison that my father was held in — and on the likely day he died —  I found in my diary an entry for that date.- Hisham Matar

"After Manet painted it, it was cut up into little pieces so people could sell parts of it. His friend [Edgar Degas] collected all the pieces he could find and the National Gallery put them together in the early 1990s. When you look at the painting, you'll see that parts of it are empty, because Degas couldn't find all the parts, not least of all Maximilian himself. You can't see him, only the firing squad and one of the generals.

"This coincidence was shocking and quite powerful for me."

Awestruck by the Sienese School

"One of the ways that I moved around the National Gallery is that I would have a target. I was interested in Velázquez, Manet, Cézanne — painters that, although mighty and distant, felt somehow reachable to me. I had some tools to connect to these people and to engage with their work, rightly or wrongly.

"But with the Sienese School of painting, which was in a different wing... there was something about those paintings that I felt was very distant from me. It felt that they came from a faraway tradition and had a purpose to remind the faithful, to be part of their worship. But these Sienese paintings particularly got me in a way that I didn't quite understand. I kept returning to them and looking at them.

But with the Sienese School of painting, which was in a different wing... there was something about those paintings that I felt was very distant from me- Hisham Matar

"I thought spending a month in Siena, where I could finally be in that place that has produced these paintings that have perplexed and delighted and amazed me for quarter of a century, would enable me look at them there. And that's what I did."

Hisham Matar's comments have been edited for length and clarity.