posted on 12 Aug 2024

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

It’s become something of a cliché to claim that some of the biggest cities in the world are best understood as ‘states of mind’ rather than simple agglomerations of people and buildings in a defined physical space. I’m not entirely sure I really understood what that meant until I read Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena.

Matar, American-born but of Libyan extract and now resident in the UK, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography with his intensely personal memoir, The Return. The book recounts how he returned to Libya following the fall of Gaddafi to try and discover the fate of his father who had been kidnapped from his home in Cairo by agents of the Egyptian secret police and the Libyan regime. 

The quest was not wholly successful and A Month in Siena, the book that follows The Return, is filled with echoes of that quest. But the reason why Matar decided to spend time processing what he’d documented in The Return goes back some considerable way to the birth of an obsession. 

Matar’s father had been kidnapped when the author was just 19 and, in an attempt to find some kind of solace for this trauma that was happening in Cairo, he found himself gravitating to London’s National Gallery to spend time with paintings from the Sienese school of Renaissance art. And when I say ‘spend time’ I really mean it. He’d take a day simply looking intently at a single painting, drawing from it all that he could. Unsurprisingly, he had harboured an unrequited desire to go to the city that had produced this art that now buttressed his life.

The completion of The Return gave him the perfect opportunity to go and spend a month there, experiencing the place and the art. But the journey doesn’t get off to a great start – first he injures his knee and then his plane is forced to turn back on itself – and he needs his wife to be with him for the first few days until he settles in.

What follows is a mix of art criticism (of a very personal kind), internal psychological voyaging and just the odd dash of travelogue. This is Siena sifted entirely through the very specific filter of Matar’s still troubled attempt to reconcile himself to the loss of his father and his inability to lay that ghost to rest.

In the month he spends there he proves himself somewhat less than gregarious. He makes a half-hearted stab at attending Italian language classes and rather fumbles towards a friendship of sorts with another ex-patriot Libyan. But this is a man who is happy to be largely solitary – in fact probably needs to be – and free to spend time with the art that he’s seeing in situ for the first time. The gallery security staff become so accustomed to his lengthy visits that they start to offer him a chair when arrives!

I can’t honestly say I came away with a vivid picture of Siena in my mind after reading this but I certainly felt like I was getting a rather privileged window into the mind of a man still trying to come to terms with a set of issues that had begun for him back when he was a 19 year-old in London. As PD Smith, reviewing the book for The Guardian, observes:

‘His stay in Siena becomes a deeply personal exploration of “the self as city”. For Matar that means coming to terms with the loss of his father and finally acknowledging the painful truth: “I will have to live the rest of my days without ever knowing what happened to my father, how or when he died or where his remains may be”.’

The hardback I read is a beautiful little production that is faithful to the artworks it reproduces. There is a paperback available too and you’d expect to pay well under £10 for a copy.

 

Terry Potter

August 2024