Biography hisham matar anatomy of a disappearance

Oversubscribed bandwagons and spotlit newsrooms are rarely hotbeds of great art. The law of child actors holds true for writers, too: the brightest spotlight burns brief.

Hisham matar website

No one knows this better than those novelists who by accident of birth or circumstance are thrust into the limelight when their country makes the news. Squinting against the public glare, they are called on to elucidate, sibyl-like, the ills besetting their homeland. Generally, however, artists do not the sharpest pundits make. Born in New York to Libyan parents and raised in Cairo, Matar is long settled in London, where he writes in beautifully chiseled English — in brave, clean sentences, occasionally startled by a detail of lingering sensuality.

To this day, his son does not know whether he is alive or dead. Matar is a gifted memoirist, deft at transforming the void at the center of his life, by some impossible alchemy, into quietly searing prose. Most memorably, however, and most inescapably, he is a novelist. It is as if the story he has to tell, being larger and more savage than life as we know it, must accede to the order of myth to find satisfactory release.

Though born from a single overwhelming preoccupation, both books are sculpted with an ingenuity that sets them apart as compelling works of fiction in their own right.