Anatomy of a Disappearance: A Novel [Hardcover]

Hisham Matar (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 23, 2011

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?

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Anatomy of a Disappearance 

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY:
Chicago Tribune • The Daily Beast • The Independent • The Guardian • The Telegraph • The Toronto Sun • Irish Times

“For Western readers, what often seemed lacking [in the coverage of the Arab Spring] 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…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…”--The New York Times

“Mesmerizing. . . . The recent events that have lent topicality to this elegiac novel might easily have swamped a lesser work. Its strength rests in Matar's decision to focus on emotional rather than material details, proving that in art, at least, the personal can trump the political.”—Houston Chronicle

“A haunting novel, exquisitely written and psychologically rich.”—Washington Post

 “[A] potent new novel . . . which moves among eerily silent interiors in London, Cairo, and Geneva to evoke the emotional vacuum that follows [a] father’s abduction.”--Vogue

“Outstanding . . . with its stylistic echoes of Nabokov.”—The Irish Times
 
“Elegiac . . . [Hisham Matar] writes of a son’s longing for his lost father with heartbreaking acuity.”—Newsday

“A son without closure writes sparingly and brilliantly about what it is to suffer loss without end.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Eloquent . . . one of the most moving works based on a boy’s view of the world.”
—Newsweek

“A searing vision of familial rupture and disintegration. . . .  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. . . . An elegant and smart evocation of the complexities of filial love.”—«Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Two things stood out as I read Anatomy of a Disappearance. First, there was the quiet power of the language, and the author’s control of it. Second, there was Hisham Matar’s ability to tell a story that from the first sentence seems inevitable, yet is full of surprises. I was moved and very impressed.”—Roddy Doyle
 
“Sculpted in a prose of clutter-free, classical precision . . . a pure demonstration of the strange alchemy of fiction.”—The Independent (U.K.)
 
“A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce.”—The Times Literary Supplement
 
“Haunting in every sense . . . An absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid.”—The Sunday Times (London)
 
“Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy.”—The Economist
 
“A fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons . . . Hisham Matar is writing from the heart.”—The Guardian (London)

About the Author

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents and spent his childhood first in Tripoli and then in Cairo. His first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It won six international literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and the inaugural Arab American Book Award. It has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Matar lives in London and serves as an associate professor at Barnard College in New York City.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: The Dial Press; 1 edition (August 23, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385340443
• ISBN-13: 978-0385340441
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #733,055 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting POV August 24, 2011

By Christina

Format:Hardcover

I first learned about this book from an interview with the author on NPR and entered to win a copy from the good reads program. I found that author did a wonderful job creating a mood of ambivailance and uncertainty. Throughout the novel the narrator is enmeshed in uncertainty and an unspoken suspicion of truth hiding just under the surface. I think the narrative quality is very subtle, but adds an interesting quality to the story. Some of the loose ends are tired up at the end, but the disappearance is not resolved much like real life.

If you are seeking a profound revelation, this is not the book for you. If you are interested in the development of a character who develops in the aftermath of a political kidnapping this is a good choice. The book allows us to reflect on how we see each other and the relationships we form. It also makes us question how much we truly know ourselves and the others in our lives.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Too many echoes of Matar's debut novel October 1, 2011

By S. McGee TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

When I read In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar earlier this year, I was overwhelmed: it promptly earned a place on my list of best books read this year thanks to the author's elegant prose and fascinating approach to its theme of a child coming to realize the complexities of the world he inhabits. So I had great hopes and expectations for Matar's second novel.

Alas, while the prose is still beautiful and I still admired the elegiac tone, this novel draws to a surprising degree on many of the same plot elements as Matar's debut. Again, we meet a young boy with an enigmatic, politically engaged father and the novel is set against the backdrop of troubles in the Arab world (although this time not always IN the Arab world.) In this case, the father seems to be a political exile (from Iraq, possibly? there is a reference to a murdered king) living partly in Switzerland and partly in Cairo. When Nuri's mother dies (another repetition: the mother figure has weaknesses that make her not a strong force in her son's life), it is through Nuri that his father meets the much-younger Mona, with whom the 12-year-old Nuri becomes obsessed. Two years later, it is at her side that he tries to understand what has happened to his father -- why he has been abducted in the middle of the night from the apartment of a woman no one has ever heard of before.

I have two entirely separate gripes with this novel that made me give it 3.5 stars. The first, obviously, is how uncannily similar these novels are. With five years separating their publication, couldn't Matar have mined some fresh material for a second book, especially when both are so short?... My second complaint is that compared to book #1, this is less emotionally convincing and less focused; there are too many characters and plot twists (for instance, Nuri's schoolfriend just moves on one day, and vanishes from the book completely.) That made it frustrating to read, and left me wondering whether the author is really as talented as I had believed after reading In his debut early this year.

I'm rounding this up to 4 stars because it is well written and intriguing and likely to appeal to the author's fans. Don't read it if you don't like "literary" fiction or are irritated by ambiguity in a novel. Read more ›

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book March 28, 2013

By WPK

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Good book, read it for an Arabic literature course, glad I read it
Very easy though, 8th grade level , buy it

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Grappling with enigmas March 26, 2012

By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

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.)

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely October 29, 2011

By Bookwoman

Format:Hardcover

I loved this novel and devoured it in about 2 days~the writing is exquisite and the story is one you will remember for a long time~I wish every book was as wonderful as this one!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Falling Short October 1, 2011

By An admirer of Saul

Format:Hardcover

After the death of his mother,Nuri draws close to his father but never really gets to know him or his life. On holiday in Alexandria, Nuri becomes infatuated with Mona and conflicting emotions are stirred in him when she marries his father.Then, in Switzerland,his father is abducted and disappears; a political abduction by the regime he opposes in exile. In trying to come to terms with his fathers disappearance and the why, fragments of his fathers life come to light and force Nuri into reappraisal....
To some extent this is a follow on from Mitars first novel 'In the Country of Men', but here he doesn't really explore the sinister political aspects of Nuri's father's disappearance, or the complexities and paranoia of terror. Rather Mitar goes for a rather well worn theme of "getting to know someone" by slow revelation of areas of the departed's life.(The maid is more than a maid;his affairs etc etc) This could just as easily have been done by simply having the father die, and the 'middle eastern tyrant's regime abduction' seems a rather irrelevent sub plot at best; a mere selling tool at worst.
Well written, yes, but this disappoints whereas 'Country of Men' excited and promised. You get the impression Mitar has a Solzenitsyn type masterpiece in him-he is extremely knowledgable on this topic and gave huge insights into the recent Libyian uprising-but is still finding out how to put it.