The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody
A Novel
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
WINNER OF THE NAGUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURE
A BEST NEW BOOK OF 2023 (THE NEW ARAB)
A “spare, well-crafted and compelling” (Samah Selim) novel in which a man in Algiers disappears without trace and the detective in search of him finds more than he expected
In Rouiba, a nondescript suburb of Algiers, an unnamed man with a troubled past escapes his everyday life to find himself caring for an old man with dementia. When the man dies, the carer disappears into thin air. A police detective is assigned to investigate the circumstances of the old man’s demise and to track down the caretaker, only to find that the unnamed man cannot be identified—that there is no trace of Mr. Nobody. The officer’s search leads him to those whose paths once crossed Mr. Nobody’s. In each of them he finds a reflection of the man he is looking for.
A raw, lyrical portrait of life on the margins in contemporary Algiers, this haunting noir captures an underworld of police informers, shady imams, bootleg beer traders, and grave robbers, and reverberates with echoes of Algeria’s violent past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Algerian writer Taibaoui makes his English-language debut with an acerbic noir involving a strange disappearance and a detective's existential quest. The embittered unnamed narrator, a homeless man, moves in with his acquaintance Mourad's elderly father in an Algiers suburb. Though the old man "disgusts with his slobber" and other symptoms of dementia, the narrator takes comfort in the man mistakenly calling him Mourad. After the old man dies, the narrator vanishes and the perspective switches to that of Rafik, the detective investigating the narrator's disappearance as he gathers conflicting accounts of the narrator's identity and whereabouts from café proprietor Mubarak and crooked bookseller Ousmane, who illegally sells liquor. Though Taibaoui's prose can be overheated, the narrator delivers an occasional pearl ("Disappearing is more generous to one's self than a phony and deceitful existence with distorted features"). Rafik's investigation stalls, and the final act sheds a bit of light on violence involving Mubarak's family and Ousmane's corruption. Rafik, meanwhile, makes for an intriguing mirror image of his quarry ("he wanted to die without letting go of life," Taibaoui writes of Rafik). Fans of Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation ought to take a look.
