Cover image from The Guardian
Of Libyan parentage,
Hisham Matar was born in New York and raised in Tripoli and Cairo. His beautifully crafted tale of a son surviving the mysterious disappearance of his father is a gripping and memorable read.
Nuri el-Alfi lives with his parents in Cairo, on the island of Zamalek with a view of the Nile. His father has wealth but no regular job; he travels and reads historical books, seeking his own name in the index.
Because "nothing is more acceptable to you than what you are born into,"
Nuri never questions his mother's old and persistent unhappiness. He simply describes "the memory of her collarbone" which is to him what a "sturdy ledge" is to a rock climber. He watches the "wide blossom" of his mother's eyes that "wilt" on
the days when she becomes unreachable, and her pale hands become as cold
as "frozen twigs."
Nuri is an only child, and when his beloved mother dies, he is left in the care of Naima, the maid who has known him since his babyhood in Paris, where his parents fled following a coup that endangered Nuri's father's life and ended his position as a government minister.
Nuri's father Kemal keeps secrets. He explains little about his political past to his twelve-year-old son, nor does he answer the boy's questions about the cause of his mother's death. The bereaved boy needs comfort from his father, but there is a gulf between them. He is "suddenly spoken of in the third person." As his father inquires of Naima whether he has bathed or brushed his teeth he feels he has "become a series of tasks."
After a year of grieving at an emotional distance from his son, Kemal takes Nuri to stay at a seaside hotel in Alexandria. Their lives are changed again when Nuri meets Mona, with whom both father and son fall in love. Mona treats Nuri, now fourteen, with a playful intimacy that tortures his tender adolescent feelings. Before long, she marries his father and becomes his stepmother. Shortly after that, he is packed off to boarding school in England.
At his exclusive school, Nuri learns to cope with the "mild yet constant disdain" of the English. Because "being Arab and German were equally disapproved of here," he forms a friendship and alliance with Alexei, the son of an orchestra conductor from Dusseldorf.
On the last occasion that Nuri sees his father, the two walk in Green Park. It is "one of those English days suspended between the seasons" when the air is "temperate yet alive to the coming winter." Nuri tries to make his father feel comfortable; Kemal shelters both of them under his umbrella.
A short time later, Nuri is waiting with his stepmother for his father to join them in Geneva for Christmas. Instead, he learns from a newspaper article that his father has been snatched by two intruders in balaclavas from the bed of a Swiss woman he never knew existed. The kidnapping story refers to his father as "the leading dissident and ex-minister Kemal el-Alfi."
Assisted by Kemal's Swiss lawyer, whose "slicked-back hair looked part of the effort to keep what he knew silent," Mona and Nuri make desperate inquiries and wait in vain for news. They return to the Cairo apartment and wait for information that never arrives. Eventually, Mona moves back to London and Nuri returns to school.
Ten years later, when he is twenty-four and in full possession of his considerable inheritance, Nuri returns to Geneva. He wants "the world to still...to fix it and be fixed within it." Instead, he finally meets Beatrice Beanameur, the woman his father was with, and recognizes in her something of himself. From this woman, he learns some surprising news. Back in London he meets Mona, tells her of this, and gets another surprise in return.
The time has come to return to Cairo, which has been a character all along. From the rooftop of the building where he lived, Nuri had watched the city hum and clank on the night of his mother's funeral "like an engine in the night."
From
the leather seat of his father's car, he observed in relentless sensory
detail the journey to the distant quarter of the city where Naima lived
with nine family members. Their two bedroom flat was in a building
"covered with flaking red paint with the words Coca-Cola repeated across
it." The street was overflowing with garbage and running with raw
sewage, and almost too narrow for the car to pass. The description of his trip to the hospital to visit his mother ten years before is an
unforgettable journey through Cairo streets where children sell jasmine
garlands to passing motorists.
Matar's language is exquisite. Narrator Nuri unfolds his tale with precise often painful images and profound observations. The funeral scene is stark and poignant, from the moment of tenderness between Nuri's father and the maid Naima to the Egyptian cafe chairs "with a profile of Nefertiti on the seat," set out "in conspiratorial silence," and the speakers that will broadcast the Quran set facing each other at angles that "suggested a quarrel."
Nuri's aunts come to life as they speak of taking him home with them to raise beside his cousins, and as they worry about "Silence, solitude, the roof, the slightest hint of contemplation" or even a longer than usual time spent in the bathroom. Mona, half-English, has "that English quality of placing the people she knew in compartments, as if fearing they would contaminate each other."
When Nuri returns to his old home in Fairouz Street, the aging porter is still there. At first he looks at Nuri not with recognition but "a benign curiosity." It is in this old home that Nuri undergoes his final ambiguous transformation.
In spite of his past loss of his own father in a way that resembles that of his protagonist, in this work of fiction Matar de-emphasizes politics in favour of describing in minute detail the emotional effects of the disappearance on the people who knew Kemal best. A major theme concerns the struggles faced by loved ones to come to terms with the enduring uncertainty of an unsolved disappearance.
Yet perhaps, like
George Orwell, Matar is conscious of writing this novel politically "without sacrificing [his] intellectual and aesthetic integrity."
