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Summary
Summary
Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri's father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.
Nuri will, however, soon regret what he wished for. His father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances. And, as the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.
Anatomy of a Disappearance is written with all the emotional precision and intimacy that have won Hisham Matar tremendous international recognition. In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, he asks: When a loved one disappears, how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?
Author Notes
Hisham Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents. He grew up in Tripoli, Libya, and Cairo, Egypt. His novels include In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance. His memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography in 2017. He also won the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards/Jean Stein Award for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Matar offers a searing vision of familial rupture and disintegration in his trenchant follow-up to In the Country of Men. Nuri el-Alfi is the son of Kamal Pasha el-Alfi, a powerful man (and exile from an unnamed Arab country that bears a striking resemblance to Matar's native Libya) living in Cairo and involved in "secret work." Two rough years after Nuri's mother dies, father and son meet Mona, a half-English, half-Arab woman, who, at 26 is 14 years older than Nuri and 15 years younger than Kamal. Nuri loves Mona madly, but of course she loves his father, and the two quickly marry and shuttle Nuri off to an English boarding school, where he pines for Mona and tries desperately to comprehend his father's personal history. Such understanding is made all the more impossible and necessary when, one wintry day, Kamal is abducted from the Geneva apartment of a woman neither Mona nor Nuri know. At once tough and tender, shaped by the sorrows of memory, Nuri's story is searching, acquiring power in its graceful acceptance of the impossibility of certainty. Although some of the novel's revelations seem more expedient than illuminating, the work as a whole is an elegant and smart evocation of the complexities of filial love. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The author of In the Country of Men (2007) limns a boy's complex relationship with his father. Nuri El-Alfi is 10 when his mother dies, leaving him in the care of his remote father, Kamal, a former minister in an unnamed Arab country's regime who is now a dissident living in exile in Cairo. It is Nuri who first catches sight of Mona, a beautiful young woman who captivates him when he is 12. Kamal romances and then marries Mona, inciting deep jealousy in Nuri, who is sent off to boarding school soon after. Two years later, Nuri travels to Geneva to meet Mona and his father for a holiday. Mona arrives first, but his father never shows up, and the pair discovers in the newspaper that Kamal has been abducted from a Swiss woman's apartment. Over the next decade, Nuri is left to patch together the truth about his father's political and amorous activities, leading him to a startling revelation. A subtle and graceful character study.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVER since a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire last December, people around the world have been asking how a new generation of Arab rebels learned to do what their parents could not: resist and even defeat a brutal police state. But a darker corollary soon arose. Why did it take so long? Why did the earlier rebellions fail? And how much damage has been done to the fabric of the societies that are now struggling, at the cost of so much blood, to reinvent themselves? For Western readers, what often seemed lacking - as in Iraq in years past - was an authentic interpreter and witness, someone who could speak across cultures and make us feel the abundant miseries that fueled the revolt. No one plays this role, in my view, as powerfully as Hisham Matar, a novelist who left Libya at the age of 9 and later emigrated to Britain. Matar's fiction revolves around his parents, and especially his father, a Libyan dissident who was kidnapped by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's agents in Cairo in 1990 and taken to Tripoli's notorious Abu Selim prison, and whose fate remains unknown. "There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest," Matar writes in the first lines of "Anatomy of a Disappearance," his second novel. "Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table." His father inhabited a world of clandestine meetings and exile that might seem glamorous if viewed from the outside. Instead, Matar narrates both of his novels from the perspective of a sensitive child, who concentrates on details like the yellow fleck of vomit on the mouth of a condemned family friend standing on the gallows; the pockmarked skin of the smiling security man who waits in a white car outside the family home; the drunken nighttime confessions of his mother, who salves her loneliness and pain with illicit bottles of grappa. Other Arab writers have tried to convey the cruelties of dictatorship over the decades, from the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in the 1950s to the contemporary Iraqi novelist Mahmoud Saeed. Aspirants are emerging every year, even in unlikely countries like Saudi Arabia; and the Arab Spring is likely to inspire still more. But many are still hampered by censorship, inadequate translation or their own blunt political agendas. Matar writes in English, in extraordinarily powerful and densely evocative prose; he seems uniquely poised to play the role of literary ambassador between two worlds that have long been locked in mutual suspicion and ignorance. To a degree, Matar's novels are variations on a theme; both are narrated by boys living in the shadow of a powerful dissident father. But they are strikingly different in tone. "In the Country of Men," a finalist for the 2006 Booker Prize, has the urgent spontaneity of a 9-year-old's perceptions, and the claustrophobic intimacy of an only child's intense bond with his desperately lonely mother. Matar uses a supple literary voice that conveys his narrator's childish confusion about what is taking place around him (his alcoholic mother's "medicine," for instance) while letting us glimpse the darker adult realities. Those realities include his father's subversive political meetings, clumsily disguised as business trips, and his mother's bitterness about being forced into marriage and childbirth at the age of 15. The book's most brilliant stroke was its portrayal of the boy narrator's own unconscious descent into betrayal, as he absorbs the hatred and refracted pain of those around him. Without knowing why, he humiliates his own best friend, and later informs on his own father to the secret police (who, it turns out, have already arrested him). After his father is taken, he watches silently as his mother swallows her pride and appeals to the hated wife of the local secret police chief to help save her husband. It is difficult to read this scene without cringing. It is also easy to imagine this kind of brutal self-abasement, multiplied a thousandfold, as the emotional tinder of the fires now raging across Libya. "That visit has remained with me ever since," Matar's narrator says. "Whenever I am faced with someone who holds the strings of my fate - an immigration officer, a professor - I can feel the distant reverberations from that day, my inauguration into the dark art of submission. . . . And this is also why, when I finally think I have gained the pleasure of authority, a sense of self-loathing rises to clasp me by the throat. I have always been able to imagine being unjustifiably hated." In a sense, "Anatomy of a Disappearance" suffers the disadvantage of being upstaged by reality. A month after he finished it, the recent wave of Arab uprisings began. Qaddafi, struggling to stave off revolt, soon freed a number of prisoners, including four of Matar's relatives who had been in prison (like his father) for 21 years. Matar began writing columns urging Western intervention in Libya, and helping journalists reporting from the country (I spoke and corresponded with him while I was there). One of his cousins was killed in the final battle for Tripoli, an event he wrote about in The Guardian. His father has still not been found. Yet for all the euphoria over Qaddafi's fall, the turmoil in Libya is not over, and it would be too soon to conclude that history has moved beyond the world depicted in Matar's fiction. It is a little chilling to read the revolutionary pep talk of one of Matar's characters in his first novel, and the withering response from the narrator's embittered mother: "'Clouds,' she said, 'only clouds. They gather then flit away. What are you people thinking: a few students colonizing the university will make a military dictatorship roll over? For God's sake, if it were that easy I would have done it myself. You saw what happened three years ago when those students dared to speak. They hanged them by their necks. And now we are condemned to witness the whole thing again.'" Like its predecessor, "Anatomy of a Disappearance" is studded with little jewels of perception, deft metaphors and details that illuminate character or set a scene. Describing the narrator's mother's funeral, he writes of his father's faint effort to lighten the moment with humor: "The possibility of a smile brushed both their faces." Later, after he stumbles into a woman's bathroom: "I saw her naked body fogged by the shower curtain: the triangle of black hair blurred and moving like one of those blots that appear after looking directly into the sun." The naked woman in question is his father's much younger second wife, and much of the novel is consumed with his own confused, preadolescent desire for her. That desire is beautifully portrayed, a humid urge that embodies both yearning for a lost mother and a frustrated effort to compete with, and come closer to, his remote father. Yet for all its elegance, "Anatomy of a Disappearance" is a little disappointing. The narrative voice has a coldness, a pained fragility, utterly at odds with the vividness and spontaneity of "In the Country of Men." In part, that is because of its subject matter: the whole book takes place in exile, the father having fled his unnamed Arab country in the year of his only son's birth. (There are details hinting that the country may be Iraq, but others that suggest North Africa.) WHERE Matar's first book was largely about the narrator's intense bond with his mother, the second novel is all about the son's struggle, for intimacy with his distant father. "Our relationship lacked what I have always believed possible, given time and perhaps after I had become a man, after he had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional eloquence and ease." These are exactly the qualities the novel lacks, perhaps intentionally so. But one cannot help feeling that this novel is a little too autobiographical, and therefore too unresolved. Matar seems to be writing about a relationship that is left deliberately unfinished, perhaps because he, too, refuses to relinquish his hope of finding his father still alive. At the book's conclusion, Nuri, the narrator, returns from Europe to the family's old home in Cairo, and gently tries on his father's old raincoat: "I tied the belt around my waist the way he used to do. He will need a raincoat when he comes back. This might still fit him. I returned it to its place." May this continuing story find an ending worthy of its narrator, whether in fiction or in life. Brutal self-abasement was the emotional tinder of the fires now raging across Libya. Robert F. Worth is a staff writer at The Times Magazine.
Guardian Review
Matar's overwhelming subject is the lost father. His own, a rich businessman and anti-Gaddafi activist, "disappeared" in 1990 and was taken to a Libyan prison. It is not known whether he is alive or dead. Nuri el-Alfi is 14 when this novel starts in 1972. His family have fled from "our country" - unnamed (why?), but evidently Iraq. His father is an "ex-minister and leading dissident". What is close up is the adolescent son's painfully confused emotions about his potent, stylish father, his dead mother and his father's sexy second wife. After the father disappears the quest for him through London, Geneva and Cairo, has the feel of one of Brian Moore's later books. Matar's sombre gift for absence and longing is powerful. As Nuri returns to his father's flat, to be looked after again by the family servants, sleep in his father's bed, work in his study, wear his watch, and wait for his return, we understand that it is not only the father who has disappeared, but the son too, a life lost inside loss. - Hermione Lee Matar's overwhelming subject is the lost father. His own, a rich businessman and anti-Gaddafi activist, "disappeared" in 1990 and was taken to a Libyan prison. It is not known whether he is alive or dead. Nuri el-Alfi is 14 when this novel starts in 1972. His family have fled from "our country" - unnamed (why?), but evidently Iraq. - Hermione Lee.
Kirkus Review
A boy grows into a man in the suffocating vacuum of his father's abrupt and unresolved vanishing.Though his books might seem to echo current events, it is the weight of personal history that drives the novels of Libyan author Matar (In the Country of Men, 2007). In his Booker-shortlisted debut novel, he deftly fictionalized his own experiencethe author's dissident father Jaballa Matar was ruthlessly kidnapped by Egyptian secret-service agents in 1990 and imprisoned in a Libyan prison at the order of Muammar Gaddafi. In his latest, Matar portrays an even more acute sense of loss by contrasting two parental losses with the complicated relationship between a boy and his young stepmother. The narrator, Nuri Pasha, gracefully relates his story from the age of 11 to the present day. His mother, a wisp of a woman, dies early, driving Nuri and his father, an exiled political activist, together. "After she passed away he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation," Nuri muses. Their world is thrown into upheaval when Nuri's father meets 24-year-old Mona, a stunning Arab woman of English descent. Closer in age to Nuri than less-than-fatherly Kamal, Mona becomes an obsession for both father and son, adding to Kamal's confusing, furtive behavior. One winter as Nuri and Mona spend time together in Montreux, they receive word that Kamal has been abducted from the bedside of a woman in Geneva. A lesser writer might suppose that Nuri and Mona would find comfort in their communal untethering, but Matar cautiously and evocatively explores the unique and terrifying world in which Nuri finds himself. "I felt guilty, too, as I continue to feel today, at having lost him, at not knowing how to find him or take his place. Every day I let my father down."A son without closure writes sparingly and brilliantly about what it is to suffer loss without end.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Whereas Matar's debut, In the Country of Men (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), focuses on political brutality, this much subtler novel only hints at violence. Again, though, it is told from a child's perspective, that of 11-year-old Nuri, who lives in exile in Cairo with his Arab father. A love triangle of sorts develops when the father marries a younger woman desired by the son. When the father goes missing, the son seeks answers and learns some surprising truths about his father's life. Nuri's relationship with his young stepmother, Mona, is the novel's most compelling element; there's plenty of tension as their connection changes over the years. The revelations in the final pages are compelling, too, with the book's evocative tone of loneliness and displacement. Some mysteries, however, such as the cause of Nuri's mother's death, are left unresolved, and the scenes set at Nuri's boarding school could be further developed. Still, this is an engrossing tale, made more so by the knowledge that the author's father, an anti-Gadhafi activist, also disappeared. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. [See Prepub Alert, 2/14/11.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 There are times when my father's absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest. Other times I can barely recall the exact features of his face and must bring out the photographs I keep in an old envelope in the drawer of my bedside table. There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy. I do not see him in the mirror but feel him adjusting, as if he were twisting within a shirt that nearly fits. My father has always been intimately mysterious even when he was present. I can almost imagine how it might have been coming to him as an equal, as a friend, but not quite. ××× My father disappeared in 1972, at the beginning of my school Christmas holiday, when I was fourteen. Mona and I were staying at the Montreux Palace, taking breakfast-- I with my large glass of bright orange juice, and she with her steaming black tea--on the terrace overlooking the steel-blue surface of Lake Geneva, at the other end of which, beyond the hills and the bending waters, lay the now vacant city of Geneva. I was watching the silent paragliders hover above the still lake, and she was paging through La Tribune de Genève, when suddenly her hand rose to her mouth and trembled. A few minutes later we were aboard a train, hardly speaking, passing the newspaper back and forth. We collected from the police station the few belongings that were left on the bedside table. When I unsealed the small plastic bag, along with the tobacco and the lighter flint, I smelled him. That same watch is now wrapped round my wrist, and even today, after all these years, when I press the underside of the leather strap against my nostrils I can detect a whiff of him. ××× I wonder now how different my story would have been were Mona's hands unbeautiful, her fingertips coarse. I still, all of these years later, hear the same childish persistence, "I saw her first," which bounced like a devil on my tongue whenever I caught one of Father's claiming gestures: his fingers sinking into her hair, his hand landing on her skirted thigh with the absentmindedness of a man touching his earlobe in mid-sentence. He had taken to the Western habit of holding hands, kissing, embracing in public. But he could not fool me; like a bad actor, he seemed unsure of his steps. Whenever he would catch me watching him, he would look away and I swear I could see color in his cheeks. A dark tenderness rises in me now as I think how hard he had tried; how I yearn still for an easy sympathy with my father. Our relationship lacked what I have always believed possible, given time and perhaps after I had become a man, after he had seen me become a father: a kind of emotional eloquence and ease. But now the distances that had then governed our interactions and cut a quiet gap between us continue to shape him in my thoughts. Excerpted from Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.