Anatomy of a Disappearance: A Novel

We've survived the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The media reports no shocking new acts of terror. We've waved flags, declared both the victims of the attack and those victimized by their response to the catastrophe heros. We've stood by while those who lost so much in the wake of 9/11 shed tears. We've survived this public ritual, coming away feeling, well, better, I suppose, in some sort of communal way.The victims of 9/11 are lucky that way. Their loss is marked. We stopped the world for a brief time to give them the solace of our joint recognition of their sorrow. All do not share their good fortune.I was reminded of this reading a new book by Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance, the story of a 14-year-old boy whose father was present in a shared world of hopes and dreams, and then, in an instant, was forever absence. There was no ceremony for this disappearance. Just silent sorrow expected to be borne without a lot of fuss and ado."The telephone continued to ring incessantly," Matar writes. The boy's father was kidnapped you see, swept away from the bed he shared with a woman by abductors suspected of targeting him because he was an outspoken critic of the third-world tyrant who ruled his country. "Then after a few days it grew quiet. Relatives and neighbors who might have filled the chairs in the hall if Father had died were silent in the face of his disappearance.... A great emptiness began to fill the place of my father. It became unbearable to hear his name."That is what silent, unshared, unrecognized, uncelebrated grief looks like: It is a scar borne quietly, a scream no one hears, a rite of passage unaccompanied by the comforting ritual of a funeral. But the disappeared are every bit as dead to those who remain as those who die a physical death.Matar is a graceful writer. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was critically acclaimed. His prose are elegant, the characters drawn with simple strokes. He draws freely from his own sense of loss, a sense provoked by the disappearance of his own father, a critic of Moammar Qadaffi who was present one day, and gone the next.Yet for all that, his latest work has an almost clinical feel to it. Yes, the protagonist lost a father, but he never loses his place in the world. He lives in a privileged bubble, with servants waiting faithfully for him in his expatriate Egypt. When his father remarries after the death of the protagonist's mother, the teenager is whisked off to an elite English boarding school. He learns that his father has provided for him in his will, leaving a generous sum with instructions that the boy is not to work until at least age 24. To earn full use of the legacy, he must complete a Ph.D., but not in business or political science, where book learning is inferior to experience.He returns to Cairo, a newly minted Ph.D., to an apartment kept for 11 years by servants loyal to his family. He moves in to the apartment. The dresser drawers are filled with his father's belongings. The closet in the master bedroom contain his father's suits. There is still hope, horribly agonizing hope, that his father will reappear. It is a hope the son cannot relinquish.This is a beautifully written story, but it is not really a story about the complete loss of moorings in the world. A less fortunate child would lose a parent and then go on to lose his place in the world. A father can disappear, and the result can be desolation, the loss of connection to a community, of all that the narrator in Matar's new novel takes for granted. Matar writes of a civilized sort of loss. It almost seems a contradiction in terms. Father is missing, but his artifacts remain. This is a polite sort of loss, the absence of a provider, but the maintenance of all the provider left behind.Some losses are complete and therefore savage. A man can disappear without a trace. He can leave nothing behind but questions, no generous will, no means of providing for those he once loved. Those left behind have nothing. The loss of a provider leaves no home to which to return, no servants to care for the bereaved, no loved one to stand in and provide shelter. Such losses are not even accompanied by the sense of closure a public ceremony provides. These are the silent sorts of loss felt by many year-in and year-out. These losses go unrecognized, but remain real.The ceremonial recognition of the losses associated with 9/11 felt much like Matar's novel to me: a stylized and almost self-indulgent sort of grief. Those who have experienced the disappearance of a parent, together with the loss of the social world the parent provided, were more alone on 9/11 than on most other days. The celebrants got the lubricant of a stranger's tears, far more than many receive in response to loss. The private silences of the solitary abandoned are much like the "great emptiness" of which Matar tried to write.Lest you think this is mere theorizing, let me relay simply this: my father disappeared when I was eight. In his wake, we lost all. There was nothing to remember him by. Even my mother lost her way, and I was sent to live with relatives. No ceremony marked the day I was sent to live with folks I had rarely seen before. I read Matar's work with a hunger for recognition that went unmet. The read was as unsatisfying as were the ceremonies devoted to 9/11. Some losses define a person, even when they are so idiosyncratic as to escape the notice of the larger world. It was not a lack of patriotism that turned me sour on 9/11; it was something akin to envy that those who lost that day received so much in return.

Libyan author Hisham Matar draws on his own life to provide insights into this story of a son's yearning for the father he loved but who vanished when he was fourteen. In real life, Matar's father Jaballa, once a member of the Libyan delegation to the United Nations and, after Muammar Gaddafi's coup, a political dissident, went into exile in Egypt in 1979, when his son was nine. He was kidnapped in 1990, when his son was twenty and has never been seen again. This fraught background provides the structure of Matar's novel, which takes place in an unnamed country (perhaps Iraq, since the King of Libya died at age 94, in exile). Nuri el-Alfi is a young boy whose mother dies when he is nine while the family is in exile in Egypt. He and his father, a dissident and former minister of the government under the king, become, simply, "two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation." When Nuri is fourteen and in boarding school in England, his father and his father's much younger, new wife Mona meet Nuri in Switzerland, and it is on this vacation that his father is abducted. The Swiss police have no leads.All this information about Nuri is given in the first five pages of the novel, and as the author continues Nuri's first person story from that moment up to age twenty-four, the bare bones outline of his life at the time of the kidnapping gradually broadens and gets filled in, and his life as an exile, without family or country, takes shape. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, the reader learns about Nuri's younger life and his father's role as a dissident in exile, but there is a curious detachment in the story-telling. Scenes throughout the novel are abbreviated - almost lacking in description, and the reader must supply his/her own images. Nuri's teenage "crush" on his stepmother, who is twenty-six when he is fourteen, is full of passion, but his angst is "told about," instead of being "recreated" to make scenes come alive.Nuri's boarding school does not encourage the show feelings, and his personal life outside of school also has no outlet for them. His father's friends from the past have not provided him with emotional guidance, and, without a close family, Nuri has no one with whom he can share anything. Even when he reaches college age, he tells us that "I kept a small radius of friends, mostly from university, with whom I shared what I imagined some siblings share: a warm alliance that still assured the necessary distance...They did not know much about me except that I came from Egypt - a fact in itself untrue."It is only when he observes a man who has fallen into the water trying desperately to hang on until he can be rescued - a symbolic scene - that Nuri, at age twenty-four, starts to become "human." The novel's most successful scenes follow that, providing the kind of feeling that is missing in the earlier sections, perhaps showing a belated coming-of-age. The novel is cleanly written and straightforward, but I longed to see Nuri acting like a real boy and showing a need for closeness - with someone, anyone - and especially with the reader. His stiff upper lip, in the face of the dramatic events of his life, gives the novel an almost journalistic air, and I felt excluded from his life when I wanted to share it. Mary Whipple

There is something different about the way native Arabic speakers write in English, and that something is beautiful. In this case, the author has said he became a novelist after failing as a poet. I think that explains it. He writes poetry in prose.Like Hemingway, he's economical with his words, choosing each one carefully and deliberately. He brings even the simplest of actions to life, tearing each moment down to its emotional core. As such, the reader feels it all, and the characters' pain is the reader's pain.Nuri is a strange kid. His stepmother Mona tells him so, although she's one to talk. But is he really so odd? More than anything, he's a boy with desires, like any typical adolescent. Since he's a child, so much is hidden from him, and as he grows up, he searches for answers and comes to his own realizations. Secrets are uncovered, but what about the biggest secret of all? Where is his father?Supposedly, the book is not autobiographical, but aspects of the plot mirror the author's life. I think that's why it's so powerful. He wrote what he knew. It's also reminiscent of The White Piano by Uvi Poznansky, another story about an odd son and his difficult relationship with his father and stepmother. The fact that I see similarities demonstrates that no matter the culture, we all face the same issues with family and life in general.Highly recommend.

There are actually two disappearances in this novel: the first is the death of the 10-year old Nuri's mother, which is never spoken about by Kamal, his father. Kamal is a uncomfortable and uncommunicative in his son's presence: Nuri does not even know what his work is - only that he was once in the Egyptian government, before the monarchy was overthrown by the military in 1952 and that he was now a dissident. When the two of them go on a holiday in Alexandria, they meet Mona, an English woman aged 26, with whom both the boy (older than his then 12 years) and his 41-year old father fall in love. Kamal married her, and for the next two years Nuri is in torment. He is sent to a boarding school in England. Then, when they are all on holiday in Switzerland, Kamal disappears, kidnapped by persons unknown. Mona and Nuri settle in England. The rest of the novel describes the complexities of Nuri's emotions and relationships. Aged 24 he revisits the town from which his father has disappeared. There some mysteries about his father are cleared up, and he learns more when he returns to London.Nuri's story is told in the first person singular; he only describes his thoughts and actions but never really explains them. Perhaps he is too damaged to be able to do so. But I could not warm to him or empathize with him. Some of his actions are remarkably callous, others - more understandably - indecisive, and the last, withholding what he now knows, leaves a painful impression on me. I thought Matar's previous book, "In the Country of Men", which also deals in part with a father-son relationship in a dangerous political climate in the Middle East, very much better. (See my review.)

this is the first time i have read a book by hisham matar but it will not be the last. the story was well thought out and left you wanting to read the next page. a truly gifted author. thank you mishan. review by Brenda Adams

Hugely evocative. This story feels as though it has grown from imaginings .As we all might make guesses about our parents life before we existed Hisham Matar has created a tender and generous portrayal of such a life through the eyes of a son. At times unexpectedly erotic and always heavy with longing for the disappeared . This novel w ill not disappoint.

Written with tenderness this book would make a wonderful film if it hasn’t already done so. I enjoyed every page.

H Mater books are an excellent written works which are very thought provoking. I would advise buying also the audio version as well, my audio book is also narrated by the author. But it.