'Anatomy' of a father's disappearance

ANATOMY OF A DISAPPEARANCE, by Hisham Matar. The Dial Press, 224 pp., $22.

In Hisham Matar's elegiac second novel, "Anatomy of a Disappearance," 13-year-old Nuri, mourning his mother's abrupt death, stands with his father in front of J.M.W. Turner's "Calais Pier" at the National Gallery in London. "Your mother would have liked this," says the father, an ex-minister from an unnamed Arab country, who, just a year later, will himself disappear.

The painting, depicting a stormy sea and black, shifting clouds that, nonetheless, allow a shaft of light to touch the sail of a struggling boat, hints at Nuri's world, one that, over the years and the course of the novel, strips him of a mother, a father, a country, a home and the illusion of romantic love. Near the book's end, alone on a bench in Geneva, where his father was kidnapped a decade earlier, Nuri (which in Arabic means "my light") watches the "skipping" clouds and hears the cries of seagulls. "I wanted this world to still," he says. "I wanted to fix it and be fixed within it. But everything was on the move, the clouds, the wind."

At the center of this shifting world is a young woman, Mona, who, after the death of Nuri's melancholic mother becomes the source of sexual rivalry between Nuri and his father. And while the father marks his territory by marrying her, the son transgresses, just a month after the father's kidnapping. This betrayal, in Nuri's barbed world, is the ultimate expression of both love and enmity, not for Mona, but for his father.

Mona is perhaps the only problematic aspect of this otherwise eloquent novel. A seductress, skilled at poker but bad at chess, perfumed and glamorous but indifferent to art, she remains largely an archetype. There are such women in the world, of course, but underneath the veneer often lurks a vulnerability, a complexity that Mona exhibits occasionally but not often enough to make her a fully realized character.

Blurred boundaries aren't only personal in this novel; they also are political. Nuri's father, exiled in Cairo, remains obsessed with his country and his association with the late king, shot in his palace courtyard in the late 1950s. (Matar leaves the country unnamed, suggesting the similarities between all autocratic regimes.) Nuri's mother warns her husband, "Don't transfer the weight of the past onto your son." But that is exactly what the father ends up doing: kidnapped in Geneva, he leaves behind the weight of his absence.

Born in New York City to Libyan parents, the author spent his childhood in Tripoli, and in 1979 fled with his family to Cairo. In 1990 his father was kidnapped, and has since been missing. Matar's first novel, "In the Country of Men," likewise delved into a father's disappearance (this time in Libya).

We cannot know how Hisham Matar, the son, lives with these events in his private life. What we do know is that Hisham Matar, the novelist, once again writes of a son's longing for a lost father with heartbreaking acuity. At the end of "Anatomy of a Disappearance," Nuri, back after a decade in his childhood home in Cairo, tries on his father's raincoat and finds a "crumpled-up tissue" in one pocket, a "half-used tube of peppermints" in the other. Deciding that his father will need a raincoat when he comes back, he returns it to its rightful place.