Hisham Matar’s father, Jaballa Matar, is a leading Libyan dissident. In 1990 he was abducted in Cairo, taken to Libya and imprisoned without trial. His family has received two letters from him in two decades. These harrowing facts shadow both the novels that Hisham Matar has written.
The figure of Kamal El-Alfi is the huge absence around which every character in Anatomy of a Disappearance must define itself. As the narrator observes in the novel’s first paragraph: “There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places.” The boy, Nuri, analyses his father, dissecting past and present as he peels away layers of memory and comes close to the bone.
There are strong echoes of Proust. Nuri is a much-loved, privileged child of a wealthy family who adores his mother and is strongly influenced by a female servant, Naima. He grows up in a world of secrets and half-disclosures. His imagination is intensely sensuous, even languorous. He is extraordinarily observant, even when he misinterprets what he sees. Above all, he is haunted from childhood by a sense of loss.
The figure of Nuri’s father is so strongly drawn that it takes time to realise that more than one disappearance is at issue. Four women have had very different relationships with Kamal. The first is Nuri’s mother, who dies early in the book. Then the half-English Mona becomes his father’s second wife. The third is Béatrice Benameur, who was with Kamal when he was abducted, and whom Nuri does not meet until he is grown up. There is a fourth, Naima, who is a constant presence in Nuri’s life from his birth. She is a servant who has been with the family since the age of 13, and at 14 accompanied Nuri’s parents to Paris, where Nuri was born. The significance of this period in Paris, and of Naima’s youth and dependency, reveals itself gradually.
Kamal El-Alfi is a great and loveable man who has sacrificed himself for his country’s good. This view is accepted by wives, servants, lovers, his man of business and wider family. He is imprisoned, but has acted, made choices and given directions that only emphasise the passivity and cabinned lives of the other characters, who still live within his commanding shadow. In growing up, Nuri must not only anatomise what has been done so cruelly to his father but also search the wounds caused by his father. In the end he will return to the simplest statements of his boyhood and understand what they really mean: “I wished Naima had come with us. She had been our maid since before I was born.”
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Nuri comes to re-read Naima’s harsh, devoted life in another light: her three-hour round trip to work from the two-room apartment that she shares with her parents and seven siblings, where raw sewage runs down the street outside; her wariness around Kamal and constancy to the child. A truth has been made to disappear, and with it a relationship; the hiding of this truth has cost lives. This beautiful, subtle novel, like the lives of its characters, repays many readings.
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar, Viking £16.99 £14.99; 247pp. To order books at discounted prices and with free p&p visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134