Missing parents are also at the heart of Hisham Matar's somber second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance.
Matar, a Libyan expatriate whose first novel, "In the Country of Men," was short-listed for the Booker Prize, is writing from firsthand knowledge. His own father, the dissident Juballa Matar, was kidnapped from Cairo in 1990 and transferred to a Libyan prison. His fate is unknown.
As with Suleiman, the narrator of "In the Country of Men," the protagonist is still a boy. Nuri's mother died when he was 11, leaving Kamal and Nuri – a grieving father and son who don't know how to show their affection for each other anymore. "After she passed away, he and I came to resemble two flat-sharing bachelors kept together by circumstance or obligation," Nuri recalls.
Then 12-year-old Nuri meets Mona, a beautiful 24-year-old Englishwoman of Arab descent on a beach in Cairo. Both father and son appear smitten, but she (unsurprisingly to everyone except Nuri) marries Kamal. Nuri's complicated relationship with his stepmother just adds to the distance between father and son, and Nuri is sent to boarding school in England.
Nuri and Mona are on holiday in Montreux, Switzerland, when his father, who was on his way to join them, is kidnapped in Geneva. Matar captures the peculiarly unending nature of a loss with no resolution, as Nuri's hollow, anchorless existence colors the book. In addition to his fear and grief for his father, Nuri grapples with the fact that any chance for reconciliation was stolen along with his dad.
"I felt guilty, too, as I continue to feel today, at having lost him, at not knowing how to find him or take his place," Nuri says. "Every day I let my father down."
Matar's novels certainly speak to current events in his home country, but his writing has a timeless authority. The death of Nuri's mother is never satisfactorily explained, but other secrets come to light by novel's end. If "Anatomy of a Disappearance" isn't quite the revelation that "In the Country of Men" was, that's at least partly because Matar's first novel set the bar so high.
