Anatomy of a Disapearance by Hisham Matar

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Libyan writer Hisham Matar’s second novel Anatomy of a Disappearance once again bears close witness to some of the writers own personal traumas the way his first novel did, but with an older narrator. 14 year old Nuri and his parents are from an unnamed country and live inCairo, where their lives appear simple on the surface but strange tensions seem to be building up in the cracks. With the death of Nuri’s mother and his father’s marriage to a much younger woman, things change drastically.

Much of the book feels as if the scenes are witnessed unfolding through the dust motes of a late afternoon, viewed through the eye of a silent spectator who in this case is a young boy, hiding around the corner watching an older woman sway away from him, wanting her knowing he’s wrong to want her. This older woman is Nuri’s stepmother Mona, closer to his age than to his father’s, as he keeps reminding himself. ‘It is true’ he says, ‘I did see Mona first’ as if that were enough for him to have some propriety over her. Mona is eroticized always, a sexual, confident and older woman as seen by a teenage boy. Even as an adult Nuri is unable to see her as much more than a fantasy – Mona is the quintessential erotic object. There is a great deal of the male gaze present actively throughout the book: says Mona, ‘You’re a strange boy. If I let you, you would spend a lifetime watching me’. And it is almost as if he does.

Matar’s work is very autobiographical. His father was abducted years ago while the family lived inCairoand his whereabouts are still unknown. This burden is heavy on Matar’s fiction, causing it to often feel oppressive and tightly contained, whether in boxy rooms of a flat inCairo, a boarding school inEnglandor a hotel room inGeneva. The parts of the narrative that take place outdoors, and are open, colourful, happy and expansive are few and in high contrast to the others. This is a retrospective narration – Matar references a tragedy before it happens, and much of the narrative is memories, tinted softer, dream like and often limited only to the world Nuri knows. His mother is particularly blurred, soft around the edges, melancholic and pensive, often studying Nuri, ‘as if [he] were not hers’. The weight of immense loss adds to the oppressive feeling that haunts even the characters -  Nuri, his father, his mother even Mona, they are all weighed down with strange emotions they barely trust themselves with. The family’s excessive loyal cook and maid Naima is a strange misfit in the cast of characters: her presence is important, but why? What is her connection to the family? There are no straight answers here, only subtleties and nuances at play, hints of possibilities that linger.

While there a few incredibly unnerving events that take place, they fit well with Matar’s delicate somnambulist prose, which is elegant on the surface but wrought with turmoil and forbidden passions underneath. It’s the undertow that pulls you in if you let it – there are secrets here, dark, terrible ones - ones that you may never completely understand. It’s sensuous, oddly sexual at times and never comfortably so - many instances cause an uncanny disturbance, an odd ripple in the narrative that is sure to leave many readers uneasy.

Hisham Matar is originally fromLibya, and given the current international interest inLibya, he could easily have written fiction more involved in current Libyan politics. He hasn’t. His work is too subtle for that. Of course politics are behind the very act of Nuri’s father’s abduction, but Matar hints at them, just as he does at things as important in the narratives personal realm. Some secrets are revealed, some are just hinted at, fierce but fleeting. In the hands of Hisham Matar it seems no secret can simply be explained away: it unfurls softly, silently between the lines.