- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Viking (3 Mar 2011)
- Language French
- ISBN-10: 067091651X
- ISBN-13: 978-0670916511
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 13.6 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 240,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
Haunting in every sense, Anatomy of a Disappearance is an absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid and its most vivid imagery in what has been lost, possibly for ever (Sunday Times )
The ability of fiction to convey injustice with a unique emotional power means that novels can change history . . . Mr Matar is the writer who has done most to convey the reality of Col Gaddafi's Libya (Gideon Rachman Financial Times )
This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings (Helen Dunmore The Times )
Probably represents the most important artistic response yet to the trauma of Arab dictatorship . . . Matar is beginning to do for the Arab experience what the likes of Salman Rushdie have done for the sub-continent (Sathnam Sanghera The Times )
Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy (Economist )
A poignant exploration of the half-state between grief and hope (New Statesman )
A tightly coiled, masterfully controlled narrative . . . A testament to the terrible human cost of unjust government in the Arab world (Independent on Sunday )
The novel is all the more powerful for the restraint with which the author writes of a son's loss and longing for his father. Fascinating, too, in its perspective on the changing face of the Arab world (Daily Mail )
Beautifully crafted . . . as much about how a person vanishes as it is how the memory of a vanished person is preserved and transformed (Financial Times )
Sculpted in a prose of clutter-free, classical precision . . . Marked by a brooding and rather sinister sensuality . . . Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance (Boyd Tonkin Independent )
The ability of fiction to convey injustice with a unique emotional power means that novels can change history . . . Mr Matar is the writer who has done most to convey the reality of Col Gaddafi's Libya (Gideon Rachman Financial Times )
This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings (Helen Dunmore The Times )
Sensually written, there is an extravagant feel even to the simplest sentence . . . From start to finish that exquisitely profound quality of uncertainty is the most wrenching aspect of all
(Telegraph )
A curiously engaging story that takes one into a world that seems simultaneously remote and familiar as something in a dream. Each time I had to put it down I couldn't wait to get back to it
(Michael Frayn )
A tenderly written novel with Shakespearean themes, it can be read as a deeply personal account of the losses that tyranny and exile produce
(TLS )
Probably represents the most important artistic response yet to the trauma of Arab dictatorship . . . Matar is beginning to do for the Arab experience what the likes of Salman Rushdie have done for the sub-continent (Sathnam Sanghera The Times )
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
(Roddy Doyle )
It has a dreamlike quality, in spite of Matar's cool and lapidary prose. It is a fable of loss, and an often troubling meditation on fathers and sons . . . Hisham Matar is writing from the heart
(Observer )
Submerged grief gives this fine novel the mythic inexorability of Greek tragedy (Economist )
A poignant exploration of the half-state between grief and hope (New Statesman )
A tightly coiled, masterfully controlled narrative . . . A testament to the terrible human cost of unjust government in the Arab world (Independent on Sunday )
The novel is all the more powerful for the restraint with which the author writes of a son's loss and longing for his father. Fascinating, too, in its perspective on the changing face of the Arab world (Daily Mail )
Beautifully crafted . . . as much about how a person vanishes as it is how the memory of a vanished person is preserved and transformed (Financial Times )
Sculpted in a prose of clutter-free, classical precision . . . Marked by a brooding and rather sinister sensuality . . . Matar suffuses Nuri's education in love and loss with an erotic frisson and fragile grace that lend the book an inner radiance (Boyd Tonkin Independent )
Product Description
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 Mona.
When Nuri first sees Mona, sitting in her bright yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina holiday resort, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri's father with whom Mona falls in love and who she will eventually marry. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he longs to get his father out of the way. However, Nuri will soon regret what he wished for. And, as he and his stepmother's world is shattered by events beyond their control, they both begin to realise how little they really knew about the man they loved.
In a voice that is delicately wrought and beautifully tender, Hisham Matar asks, in his extraordinary new novel, when a loved one disappears how does their absence shape the lives of those who are left?
Inside This Book
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If a book had an emotion then I think the one word that you could conjure up when finishing `Anatomy of a Disappearance' is longing. As we follow the story of Nuri, who is on holiday in Alexandria with his father, who has recently been bereaved by the death of his mother. Here he befriends a foreign woman (who is set alight from the first scene by her bright yellow swimsuit) Mona, a young woman who he soon becomes rather obsessed with before learning that his father has very similar feelings. Of course Nuri only being a boy at the time knows this can lead nowhere yet that doesn't stop him from being romantic about the whole situation, for his father though it is a different matter. Things are of course going to get complicated and initial problems between father and son since Nuri's mothers death start to become darker, even bitter.
If this wasn't enough to keep a story brimming with tension Matar adds several more strands which simmer in the background. One of the strands is that of Nuri's fathers place in the past history of Libya where he was the right hand man to a King who was subsequently assassinated leaving him forced to flee to France. This opens a big background underlying subplot about the state the family is in, how they have made the money they have and where they have ended up. There are also two slight mysteries. Nuri's mothers death leaves some open ended questions and there is also the fact that when the book initially opens, before this fateful holiday, Nuri has told us somewhere in the future sat by Lake Geneva with Mona that his father has strangely disappeared. All these things bubble away in the background as you read on which is incredibly satisfying to have unfolding in the pages in your hands.
It also to me showed what a stunning writer Matar is. I hadn't heard of him before despite my interest in the Man Booker, for which he was shortlisted with his debut novel `In The Country of Men' in 2006. Yet having done some research after reading the book I discovered that his own father disappeared several decades ago (which he wrote about in the Guardian here) and this seems to be an outpouring of some of that. Not that that should take anything away from this book by the way or Matar's prose. His writing is exquisite, not a phrase I tend to use very often, and is clearly designed to say the maximum in a minimal way yet effortlessly without force. There is much going on in the book and switches in time and he gives the reader enough information to grasp at the unsaid which he trusts the reader will work out and question.
`Anatomy of a Disappearance' felt like one of those rare books you more than just read. You live it. You learn it, and in my case I went off afterwards and learnt far more about it once I had finished. It's a short book with so much to say I would be amazed if anyone who reads it isn't left thinking about it or even starting it all over again after their first reading. I am inclined to agree with Dovegreyreader who after reading it tipped it as an early possible Man Booker contender. I certainly would be happy to see it there.
If this wasn't enough to keep a story brimming with tension Matar adds several more strands which simmer in the background. One of the strands is that of Nuri's fathers place in the past history of Libya where he was the right hand man to a King who was subsequently assassinated leaving him forced to flee to France. This opens a big background underlying subplot about the state the family is in, how they have made the money they have and where they have ended up. There are also two slight mysteries. Nuri's mothers death leaves some open ended questions and there is also the fact that when the book initially opens, before this fateful holiday, Nuri has told us somewhere in the future sat by Lake Geneva with Mona that his father has strangely disappeared. All these things bubble away in the background as you read on which is incredibly satisfying to have unfolding in the pages in your hands.
It also to me showed what a stunning writer Matar is. I hadn't heard of him before despite my interest in the Man Booker, for which he was shortlisted with his debut novel `In The Country of Men' in 2006. Yet having done some research after reading the book I discovered that his own father disappeared several decades ago (which he wrote about in the Guardian here) and this seems to be an outpouring of some of that. Not that that should take anything away from this book by the way or Matar's prose. His writing is exquisite, not a phrase I tend to use very often, and is clearly designed to say the maximum in a minimal way yet effortlessly without force. There is much going on in the book and switches in time and he gives the reader enough information to grasp at the unsaid which he trusts the reader will work out and question.
`Anatomy of a Disappearance' felt like one of those rare books you more than just read. You live it. You learn it, and in my case I went off afterwards and learnt far more about it once I had finished. It's a short book with so much to say I would be amazed if anyone who reads it isn't left thinking about it or even starting it all over again after their first reading. I am inclined to agree with Dovegreyreader who after reading it tipped it as an early possible Man Booker contender. I certainly would be happy to see it there.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Hisham Matar's background has a particular resonance at the moment, with the momentous and violent events taking place in Libya. His father was a political dissident opposed the Gaddafi regime, and the family were forced to flee their home and went to live in Egypt. It was from Cairo that his father was abducted, never to be seen again by Matar, although he was reported to be imprisoned in a notorious Libyan jail.
And his latest novel `Anatomy of a Disappearance' is a moving piece of writing that draws heavily on this personal experience of loss. It is a relatively short book, at less than 250 pages, but is densely packed with emotion, desire, and desperation. It is beautifully written as it explores the relationship between Nuri, a young boy, his father Kamal, and new girlfriend Mona. It is fourteen year old Nuri who spots Mona first, by a hotel pool whilst on holiday, and he gallantly and confidently helps her to take a thorn out of her foot. She is much younger than Kamal, but nevertheless becomes his partner, but Nuri cannot repress the strong feelings that he had and continues to have for her, with inevitable consequences.
His wealthy and privileged upbringing, despite the loss of his beloved mother, is the backdrop to this tale, played out surrounded by other strong female characters like his long devoted servant Naima. He is sent away to an English boarding school at Mona's insistence, and from here has to suffer the wrench of his father's disappearance. Kamal's political views and actions are not clearly spelt out, but the inference about them leading to his loss of liberty is made clear.
Matar writes in a sensitive and moving way, and tells a rich and multi layered story which is simple, but with many complexities beneath its obvious themes. It deserves to be read for its considerable merits, but also as a stark reminder of the human loss behind such brutal dictatorships.
And his latest novel `Anatomy of a Disappearance' is a moving piece of writing that draws heavily on this personal experience of loss. It is a relatively short book, at less than 250 pages, but is densely packed with emotion, desire, and desperation. It is beautifully written as it explores the relationship between Nuri, a young boy, his father Kamal, and new girlfriend Mona. It is fourteen year old Nuri who spots Mona first, by a hotel pool whilst on holiday, and he gallantly and confidently helps her to take a thorn out of her foot. She is much younger than Kamal, but nevertheless becomes his partner, but Nuri cannot repress the strong feelings that he had and continues to have for her, with inevitable consequences.
His wealthy and privileged upbringing, despite the loss of his beloved mother, is the backdrop to this tale, played out surrounded by other strong female characters like his long devoted servant Naima. He is sent away to an English boarding school at Mona's insistence, and from here has to suffer the wrench of his father's disappearance. Kamal's political views and actions are not clearly spelt out, but the inference about them leading to his loss of liberty is made clear.
Matar writes in a sensitive and moving way, and tells a rich and multi layered story which is simple, but with many complexities beneath its obvious themes. It deserves to be read for its considerable merits, but also as a stark reminder of the human loss behind such brutal dictatorships.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
When a young boy loses his mother, one consequence is that he finds himself having to relate to his father in a new way, perhaps with a new intensity, which may or may not be an improvement on the older, more easy-going but semi-detached relationship. In Anatomy of a Disappearance young Nuri finds himself full of grief for his mother but far from consoled by his relationship with his rather distant father, a political activist, world traveller and lover of women.
Nuri goes on holiday with his father to a beach-front hotel in Alexandria, but notes that "he seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child". While sitting by the pool one day, Nuri meets Mona, a young woman in a yellow swimming suit and in the easy way which young boys can sometimes adopt, finds himself picking a thorn out of her toe. Nuri's father watches the exchange between Mona and Nuri and the outcome of his glance suggests that it is not only the son who will become entranced with Mona.
For the rest of the holiday, Nuri follows Mona around, observing her every movement and developing a powerful early-adolescent love for her. One morning Nuri comes down to breakfast and finds that Mona and his father have already eaten and are walking by the sea, "their paces could not have been better matched". With adult eyes we see what Nuri is soon going to discover, that Mona is going to be a permanent feature in both their lives from now on, but her emotional hold of both father and son is going to lead to some subtle complications later on.
Hisham Matar is a fine writer, perfectly portraying the yearning of adolescence and the growth into adult-hood of Nuri, a thoughtful and serious boy, who's emotional development will be increasingly steered by the beautiful and enigmatic Mona.
But this is not just a book about a boy's feelings for an older woman. Nuri's father is a political activist who operates on the world stage, and the story takes a dramatic turn with events happening across several nations.
I enjoyed reading this book. At first I thought I was going to get bored with so much adolescent angst, but the story soon takes off in some very unexpected directions. The writing is beautiful throughout - sparse, elegant prose which demonstrates Matar's ability to exercise restraint where it is required, levaing the reader to fill in the gaps. Reading Anatomy of a Disappearance is a joint-effort, the words generating an inner dialogue with readers as they reflect on the occasionally poetic turn of phrase.
Hisham Matar is well-qualified to write this book, born in America of Libyan parents he spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt, but took his degree in architecture in London. As the book moves around from one location to another it is quite clear that this is normal territory to this cosmopolitan writer.
Nuri goes on holiday with his father to a beach-front hotel in Alexandria, but notes that "he seemed to have lost his way with me; widowhood had dispossessed him of any ease that he had once had around his only child". While sitting by the pool one day, Nuri meets Mona, a young woman in a yellow swimming suit and in the easy way which young boys can sometimes adopt, finds himself picking a thorn out of her toe. Nuri's father watches the exchange between Mona and Nuri and the outcome of his glance suggests that it is not only the son who will become entranced with Mona.
For the rest of the holiday, Nuri follows Mona around, observing her every movement and developing a powerful early-adolescent love for her. One morning Nuri comes down to breakfast and finds that Mona and his father have already eaten and are walking by the sea, "their paces could not have been better matched". With adult eyes we see what Nuri is soon going to discover, that Mona is going to be a permanent feature in both their lives from now on, but her emotional hold of both father and son is going to lead to some subtle complications later on.
Hisham Matar is a fine writer, perfectly portraying the yearning of adolescence and the growth into adult-hood of Nuri, a thoughtful and serious boy, who's emotional development will be increasingly steered by the beautiful and enigmatic Mona.
But this is not just a book about a boy's feelings for an older woman. Nuri's father is a political activist who operates on the world stage, and the story takes a dramatic turn with events happening across several nations.
I enjoyed reading this book. At first I thought I was going to get bored with so much adolescent angst, but the story soon takes off in some very unexpected directions. The writing is beautiful throughout - sparse, elegant prose which demonstrates Matar's ability to exercise restraint where it is required, levaing the reader to fill in the gaps. Reading Anatomy of a Disappearance is a joint-effort, the words generating an inner dialogue with readers as they reflect on the occasionally poetic turn of phrase.
Hisham Matar is well-qualified to write this book, born in America of Libyan parents he spent his childhood in Libya and Egypt, but took his degree in architecture in London. As the book moves around from one location to another it is quite clear that this is normal territory to this cosmopolitan writer.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Anatomy of a Disappearance
Refreshingly well written book, an intriguing narrative. That is it in a nutshell. What more is there to say about it?
Published 4 months ago by Penname
subtle novel about a son's love for his disappeared father, his...
The novel starts with the appearance in the life of the just about to become adolescent narrator of the woman who will become his stepmother (though 'I saw her first' is what he... Read more
Published 5 months ago by William Jordan
Hidden depths
I read this for a recent book group. I enjoyed it, taking it purely at face value. I then discussed it within our group, several of whom were of Arab origin, and suddenly I... Read more
Published 6 months ago by DubaiReader
Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a disappearance
Excellent book, well written, very insightful and hits many key issues that many people can relate to. Another great work by Mr Matar.
Published 6 months ago by Swehlistuta
"Eighteen months after my parents employed Naima, our king was dragged...
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. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Mary Whipple
Keeps you reading
This is a story about a young boy's first love and his troublesome family past that have consequences for his growing up. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Ingrid
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