The Disappearance of Mr. Nobody

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 [the narrator] 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. (Jan.)