Summary

After the day spent in Benghazi catching up with relations such as his cousin Maher as depicted in the previous chapter, Matar was scheduled by his cousin Marwan to conduct an interview at a local library. The event lasted three hours with an intermission in the middle, yet Matar only writes of two interactions with supposed strangers. During the intermission, a man who had caught Matar's gaze earlier handed him a book titled The Scholar and explained how he and Matar's father edited the literary journal together in college. He draws Matar's attention to two specific stories, written by Jaballa Matar, to which Matar confesses: "I knew of my father's attempts at poetry but I had no idea that when he was a student he had fancied himself a writer of prose fiction" (116).

At the end of the event, the audience asked Matar...