Dany Laferrière was born in Port-au-Prince but fled to Montreal in the late ’70s, during the oppressive regime of Baby Doc Duvalier. The experience of exile — the foreignness of an adopted land coupled with an almost obsessive attachment to the abandoned home — often sharpens a creative response to the place one has fled; Joyce had to leave Ireland before he could write Ulysses. It’s perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that having reached a certain age Laferrière has written a novel about a Haitian-born, Montreal-based novelist who returns to the country of his birth following the death of his father.

A combination of poetry and prose, The Return is stylistically adventurous. However, the poetry tends to eschew syntactical virtuosity and metaphor, which can make it read like prose with line breaks, and the divisions between the formats often seem arbitrary. Despite this, the material is never less than eminently readable: Laferrière’s style is straightforward and supple, at least as it appears in long-time collaborator David Homel’s translation.

As for the story, Laferrière does not provide scenes per se, opting instead for a collage of sense impressions and memories to depict the roiling, sensual landscape of his homeland, in all its manifest contradictions: the rich who flee the discord of city life for refuge in the country; the art that thrives in a culture of repression; the seething discontent among friends and family members (“Most kidnappings are carried out between people who know each other well,” Laferrière writes. “That’s where hatred is most deep-rooted”).

The title refers to the narrator’s physical return to Haiti, but on another level it nods at the happy child he was before the tide of history exiled him to a land of cold and snow. Those twin distances — the physical one between Port-au-Prince and Montreal, and the emotional one between the narrator’s carefree youth and his more ruminative adulthood — give the novel its conflicted heart and soul.

The book’s French title is L’enigme du retour, and it’s hard not to think subtlety has been lost in translation. Returning home, Laferrière suggests, implies something mysterious, a reckoning with the riddles and ambiguities of an accumulated life. Especially for someone who has lived so long in exile, coming home may be as enigmatic as the concept of home itself.