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Anatomy of a Disappearance

2011 novel by Hisham Matar

Anatomy of a Disappearance is the second novel by the award-winning Libyan writer Hisham Matar, first published in 2011 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Books.

Plot summary

The book follows the story of Nuri, a teenager living in exile with his family in Cairo. After the sudden death of his mother, he also loses his father Kamal Pasha el-Alfi who disappears in mysterious circumstances in Switzerland, and it becomes obvious that he was abducted by the regime of their country (which is never named). The young Nuri tries to come to terms with the disappearance of his father.

Characters

Nuri el-Alfi - the young teenage narrator
Kamal Pasha el-Alfi "Baba" "Father" - Nuri's father
Ihsan "Mother" - Nuri's mother
Mona - Nuri's Stepmother
Taleb - Kamal Pasha's best friend
Hydar - Kamal Pasha's best friend
Naima - el-Alfi's young Egyptian maid
Hass - Kamal Pasha's Swiss confidant
Fadhil - Nuri's uncle
Salwa - Nuri's aunt
Souad - Nuri's aunt

Reviews

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This story has the feel of a novel excerpt. Hisham Matar has a new novel coming out in August and I wouldn’t be surprised if this story is extracted from it. It’s interesting anyway, although it seems overwritten to me.

The author was born of Libyan parents who lived in Tripoli and Cairo. The narrator’s parents live in Cairo, but are from elsewhere—a country the narrator doesn’t name. But since it’s a two-day drive from Cairo, Libya seems to fit. The parents are in exile—the father was a government minister and advisor to the king who fell in a revolution.

In the story, the mother dies—of what we don’t know. But then the narrator learns the timeline of how the maid, Naima, came to live with them, and the timing of his birth and first months of life when they were exiled in Paris. The suggestion is that Naima is actually the mother, I suppose, although that is only hinted.

I suppose I should read the story again, but I hate the online version of the magazine and once again my issue has failed to show up—now nearly 10 days late. So I’ll leave it at that.

January

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Originally published in The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 85.

The narrator of this story, Nuri, is writing mainly from an eight-year-old's perspective, talking about his Mother and Father, but the titled protagonist is actually the maid, Naima. Matar's moxie comes from the ways in which he hints at Naima's true role in the family: she was hired at the age of thirteen because Mother "wanted someone young, to get used to our ways, to be like a daughter," and as Father's old Parisian friend Taleb implies, she is actually Nuri's birth-mother: "Naima was innocent, of course. Ultimately, everyone is innocent, including your father." These facts, gleaned toward the end of the story but never implicitly stated (even Naima's morning sickness is given an alternative: sea sickness), give new meaning to much of the earlier parts of the story, from Naima's devotion to Nuri, the family's devotion to her, and the Mother's slow, silent illness (never given a name, it must be depression):

"Don't transfer the weight of the past onto your son," [Mo