Review of "Anatomy of a Disappearance"

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Hamish Hamilton Canada

“There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

With this tender opening sentence, Hisham Matar begins to weave a subtle pattern of absence and loss that defines the emotional territory of Anatomy of a Disappearance, his second novel.

The narrator of this beautifully paced story is Nuri el-Alfi, who at 14 loses his father when he disappears from an apartment in Geneva, likely the victim of a political kidnapping. The loss is unbearable yet even before his father’s disappearance; we discover that Nuri is no stranger to the subtractions of life.

At birth, Nuri had already lost his native country because his father, a close advisor to the deposed king, had been forced to flee to Egypt when a military regime took power. Safe in Cairo, the small el-Alfi family lives in a quiet luxury that belies the friction Nuri, an only child, senses between his parents. Nuri’s mother is habitually withdrawn, wrapped in a self-imposed silence, and his father travels often on business. The only constant in the boy’s lonely life is Naima, a young servant girl who is devoted to him in a way neither parent can seem to manage.

When he is ten, Nuri’s mother dies suddenly of an unnamed malady that the narrator, in retrospect, believes was the result of deep sorrow. “So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is so acceptable as that which we are born into.”

Although in the end, Nuri will have three mothers, this is a story about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Like an insatiable thirst, Nuri craves an intimacy with his father that their love for each other fails to summon. He yearns “...for an easy sympathy... a kind of emotional eloquence and ease.”

Instead, his father unwittingly becomes Nuri’s rival when they both fall under the spell of the sensuous Mona whom they meet poolside at a resort in Alexandria. Mona is half-English, provocative and quickly, inspires a new nexus of desire in Nuri. The triangle – father, son and Mona - grows more brittle and difficult when Mona becomes Nuri’s stepmother despite his insistence that “I saw her first.”

Soon after the marriage, Nuri is sent off to a boarding school in England where he concocts schemes to steal time with Mona. As is often the case, you must be careful what you wish for. After his father’s disappearance, the relationship with Mona unravels as his father’s secret life is slowly revealed and Nuri learns what most children rarely acknowledge, that we really know little about the lives of our parents.

This is semi-autobiographical ground for Matar who was born in New York City to Libyan parents and raised in Tripoli and Cairo. His father, Jaballah Matar, was an influential businessman and a Qaddafi opponent, who was disappeared from Cairo in 1990 and interred in Libya. It is not known whether he is still alive as no one has seen him since 2002.
Now a resident of London, Matar’s first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2006. It also was narrated by a young boy growing up in Libya with an unhappy mother and an absent father. Yet knowing how closely his fiction runs to Matar’s life in no way undermines the power of his writing - the aching simplicity by which he builds mood and pitch.

“Relatives and neighbours 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...At times it was almost possible to imagine he never existed. Yet every morning, when I opened my eyes, I believed he was there, that I would find him sitting at the dining room table, holding a cup of coffee in the air as he looked down at the folded newspaper in his lap.”

In passage like these, Matar limns the borders of loss with a fine, delicate hand and reminds us that not knowing can be the heaviest burden to bear.