Illusion of Return (The Contemporary Art of the Novella) (original 2007; edition 2008)

The unnamed narrator receives a call from a friend residing in America for the last 17 years. Ali is on his way back to Lebanon but will be on Heathrow airport for a stop-over and has asked the narrator to meet him there.

The imminent meeting brings back a host of old, painful memories about life in Lebanon with friends and family. It was an occupied space and most of the time, he and those around him feared for their lives and were preoccupied with thoughts of survival. These unnatural, negative circumstances led to continued feelings of inadequacy, distrust and guilt on a societal level.

Since leaving Lebanon 15 years before, he has managed to suppress his pain and the memories of before. He has not thought of returning to his homeland, but the meeting and his subsequent conversation with Ali awakens a yearning to go back and, at the same time, a reluctance to do so. For him, this confrontation with Ali and the past is a painful, symbolic illusion of return to a very challenging time and place in his life.

The author was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon in 1965. He left Lebanon in 1989 and eventually settled in London where he works as a journalist, critic and essayist for a number of Arabic and English newspapers and magazines. In many ways the book read like a memoir to me. This is an important, insightful book, one I would recommend.

Compressed, evocative, and deeply intelligent, El-Youseff's novella concerns a younger Palestinian man living in London who casts his glance backward on a period of his life in Lebanon he cannot forget or transcend. An encounter with a friend at Heathrow airport, first accused of acting as a collaborator with the Israelis, provides an entry for recollecting the final evening that four friends spent in Lebanon before the Civil War of the 1980s envelops their lives.
Like his friends, all of whom harbor some secret or hidden handicap, the narrator has guarded a family secret for years--one that prevents him from "returning" to family in any significant fashion and one which makes the Palestinian desire to return to their native lands seem like an illusion. The Palestinian resistance movement forms part of the reason for his family secret, as his sister, in order to escape a stifling life at home, became a female soldier within that movement. However, she remains so harassed and bullied by her older brother, who wants her to relinquish her role, that she commits suicide, an event that the family seals as a permanent secret by lying about what happened. The narrator keeps a vigil for the memory of his sister and, in the meantime, the friend who had been exiled for collaboration finds the means to return, inspired in part by conversations he has had with a Holocaust survivor. A brilliant and necessary work of Palestinian fiction. ( )

Intimate and touching, El-Youseff's book is about a Palestinian emigre in London looking back on an intense period of his life in Lebanon where he grew up. A brief Heathrow rendez-vous with an old friend, now 'exiled' as a 'collaborator' in the USA, is the book's fulcrum as the narrator recounts how the events transpired leading up to a final night of four friends together for a last time before the dramatic circumstances of 1980s Lebanon catch up with them all.

As the story unfolds it becomes clear that the narrator has kept a family secret from the world all these years. The situation of the Palestinian refugees is the backdrop to an expose of the hypocrisy encountered behind 'the movement'-led resistance. The illusion of return in the title is the realisation the author comes to that there is no chance of any return but a symbolic one. For him, when a people has nothing to dream of or aspire to it will resort to a collective living in the past, as if that memory will succour them indefinitely. Sensitively written, this book is an interesting and original approach to the subject. ( )

The narrator of this novella is a Palestinian who emigrated from war stricken 1980s Lebanon to London, who receives a phone call from a long lost friend who has also emigrated, to the United States, and wishes to meet with him during a layover at Heathrow Airport on his way back to Lebanon. They haven't spoken to each other or returned to Lebanon after a tragic day that deeply affected both men and their families.

The book's title refers not only to the narrator's belief that it is an illusion that Palestinians can return to their former homes, but also to the impossibility of accurately reexamining memories of the past. It is very well written, and the author, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, gives us a vivid portrayal of the complexity of life in wartime Lebanon, and the pain and isolation that is a daily experience of its exiles. ( )