The success of The Disappearing Act lies in how diverting scenes inform larger questions about what makes us who we are when we’re without possessions and places and work, or how we categorize people in the absence of other identifiers, through nationality, for example... The greatest switchback is how it shows that if Stepanova, like her avatar M, is now a novelist in name only, she can nonetheless still do the job very well indeed.
— John Self, The New York Times
From the renowned Russian author of In Memory of Memory, a stunning new dream-like work about exile, home, and art.
The writer M has lived in the city of B ever since her homeland declared war on a neighboring state. While in exile, she is unable to write and suffers from loneliness, shame, and despair. But then M is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, and after a series of missed connections and mishaps, including losing her phone, she finds herself all alone in the wrong coastal town. She feels a flicker of liberation—the possibility of starting over—but memories of childhood, books, films and tarot cards pull her back, the last fragments of a vanishing world. Then she meets a troupe of circus performers who invite her to join them …
In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.
The success of The Disappearing Act lies in how diverting scenes inform larger questions about what makes us who we are when we’re without possessions and places and work, or how we categorize people in the absence of other identifiers, through nationality, for example... The greatest switchback is how it shows that if Stepanova, like her avatar M, is now a novelist in name only, she can nonetheless still do the job very well indeed.
— John Self, The New York Times
Captivating and capacious... The novel comes across as an urgent call to resist complacency and recover one's vitality in the face of injustice. It's a stunner.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This autofictional blend of memory and fable tracks a changing sense of self... echoes of poetry, skillfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale.
— Anna Aslanyan, The Guardian
Expect entrancing prose suffused with wry observations, a little humour and memories of lost worlds—the world lost with the fall of the Soviet Union; the world lost to Vladimir Putin; the world lost to the Ukraine war—more redolent of great poetry than contemporary fiction.
— Marko Gluhaich, Frieze
The DisappearingAct is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement
— Abdulrazak Gurnah
Stepanova's prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid and fluid.
— Barbara Conaty, The Library Journal
Exile is never solely a physical state of dislocation, but a linguistic and mental one too—all the more so when a language comes to feel implicated in violence. As Stepanova knows, dreams, like reality itself, can quickly become nightmares.
— Luke Warde, The Irish Independent
Poignant, ironizing its own ironies, as M finds two wrongs—any number of wrongs—never make a right.
— Michael Autrey, Booklist
This is an intimate and profound study of liminality and identity from one of the most important writers of our time.
— Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
An essential book written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present's failure to learn lessons from the past.
— Catherine Taylor, Irish Times
Dugdale’s translation is a loving one, beautifully rendering Stepanova’s melodic and rhythmic prose into precise English… With The Disappearing Act, Stepanova’s talents have grown to include a magical quality, and it leaves me longing for more of her tricks.
— Olga Zilberbourg, On the Seawall
Existing somewhere between dream and reality, The Disappearing Act is a meditation on exile, identity, and the allure of disappearing completely from one of contemporary Russia's most critical voices.
— Linnea Gradin, Electric Lit
The novel provides a striking articulation of the incongruity in M’s anonymity…M does not so much go off the grid as temporarily disappear into it—she finds herself in movement without the structure of departure and arrival.
— Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, Kismet
Beautifully suffocating…A gem of literature.
— Madeline Schultz, Chicago Review of Books
Russian poet Maria Stepanova anatomizes the moral attributes of language and identity in an elegiac novel mourning the disgrace of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. . . Striking at the heart of a pressing crisis for a new wave of emigrants, The Disappearing Act is a concise investigation into the burden of national guilt and the hope for personal transformation.
— Brock Covington, Open Letters Review
The Disappearing Act is about what happens when the story of one’s life cleaves in uncomfortable, incongruous ways… Stepanova’s short vignettes—that move elegantly between M’s external and internal worlds—keep the story skipping along.
— Matthew Janney, The Financial Times
An intriguing short novel, written in lyrical, magnificently translated prose, about two days in the life of the novelist M who is journeying to appear at a literary festival. Losing herself, in a symbolic death and rebirth is where the story ends up, although we are left to doubt whether such an escape is really possible. . . M.’s story, a book for today, speaks eloquently to our own experience, as great literature is supposed to do.
