The Disappearing Act E-Book

Maria Stepanova

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

The writer known as M. is living in exile while her home country wages war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and severed from her language, M. finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she travels to a nearby country for an event, a twist of fate leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar city, phoneless and untraceable. In this rupture, 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. For a moment, reinvention seems within reach. Oscillating between reality and dream, written in rich, hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act is a haunting meditation on identity, language and the fragile desire to disappear by Maria Stepanova, one of Russia's greatest living writers.

Leseprobe

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‘The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement.’

— Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Nobel Prize laureate

‘A profound, unsettling meditation – at once lucid and mournful – on political exile, reinvention after the rup­ture of belonging, the writer’s reckoning with collective responsibility, and the beasts we carry – national, ancestral, unnamed—that shape us even as they threaten us.’

— Lea Ypi, author of Free

‘Political evil has re-emerged across the West, imposing agony upon all people of conscience, and new challenges on writers and artists. In her incandescent poems and essays, Maria Stepanova has never shirked the weight of history long borne by writers from Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Her artistic, intellectual and spiritual resources seem even richer in her first novel, The Disappearing Act. I have not read a novel that attests, with such melancholy precision, to the shame, absurdity and confusion of being human today, or describes so acutely the immense but too often frustrated craving for radical self-transformation.’

— Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

‘In this captivating and capacious novel from Stepanova (In Memory of Memory), a 50-year-old novelist experiences a bizarre and liberating metamorphosis while in exile from her unnamed home country, which has just started a devas­tating war with its neighbour…. Far from a literary gimmick, 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

‘Stepanova is a master of the mirror, she is able to extract new tricks from even the well-worn form of autofiction.’

— Süddeutsche Zeitung4

Praise for In Memory of Memory

‘Extraordinary – a work of haunting power, grace and originality.’

— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

‘A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldn’t put it down; it felt sort of like watching a hypnotic YouTube unboxing-video of the gift-and-burden that is the twentieth century. In Memory of Memory has that trick of feeling both completely original and already classic, and I confidently expect this translation to bring Maria Stepanova a rabid fan base on the order of the one she already enjoys in Russia.’

— Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot

‘Stepanova’s companionable prose balances high seri­ousness with self-ironizing deadpan humour. Without pretension, she erects her house of memory in the neigh­bourhood of Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and Sebald.’

— Rachel Polonksy, TLS

‘This remarkable account of the author’s Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory.… [B]oth sensitive and rigorous.’

— New Yorker

‘Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanova’s profound engagement with the power and potential of memory, the mother of all muses. An exploration of the vast field between reminiscence and remembrance, In Memory of Memory is a poetic appraisal of the ways the stories of others are the fabric of our history.’

— Esther Kinsky, author of Grove5

‘There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory. A microcosm all its own, it is an inimitable journey through a family history which, as the reader quickly realizes, becomes a much larger quest than yet another captivating family narrative. Why? Because it asks us if history can be examined at all, yes, but does so with incredible lyricism and fearlessness. Because Stepanova teaches us to find beauty where no one else sees it. Because Stepanova teaches us to show tenderness towards the tiny, awkward, missed details of our beautiful private lives. Because she shows us that in the end our hidden strangeness is what makes us human. This, I think, is what makes her a truly major European writer. I am especially grateful to Sasha Dugdale for her precise and flawless translation which makes this book such a joy to read in English. This is a voice to live with.’

— Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

‘A daring combination of family history and roving cultural analysis … a kaleidoscopic, time-shuffling look at one family of Russian Jews throughout a fiercely eventful century.’

— John Williams, New York Times

‘[R]emarkable and rich with meaning.’

— Tessa Hadley, Guardian

‘You can sense the decades of contemplation Ms. Stepanova has dedicated to these questions in the sparkle and density of her prose, which Sasha Dugdale has carried into English so naturally that it’s possible to forget you are reading a translation. This is an erudite, challenging book, but also fundamentally a humble one, as it recognizes that a force works on even the most cherished family possessions that no amount of devotion can gainsay.’

— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal6

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THE DISAPPEARING ACT

MARIA STEPANOVA

Translated by SASHA DUGDALE

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Contents

Title Page1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.21.22.AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

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1.

In the summer of 2023 the grass carried on growing as if nothing at all was wrong. It grew as if that was simply how things had to be, as if to demonstrate once again that, no matter how much killing took place on the face of the earth, the grass at least intended to keep on stubborn­ly pushing up through the soil. Perhaps it was a duller green than usual, perhaps it lost the milk-white tinge of its tips almost immediately, but still it grew on unde­terred. Almost as if the lack of water forced the grass to cling tighter to the earth, sending out ever-newer shoots that dried and withered before they could reach their full growth.

In the summer of 2023 the planet experienced its hottest day since records began. Picture the scene: generations of Lilliputian scientists pressing themselves against Earth’s vast body, measuring her temperature day and night, gathering samples of the sweat at her brow and taking particular pleasure in noting the parts of her that were coldest. All this information they recorded in a logbook, presumably finding consolation in the steady breathing of the sleeping giant; the way in which extraordinary rushes of fever and chills were quickly followed by what might be called normal temperatures; or the condition of her hair and nails, which was as good as could be expected for someone who had lain motion­less through the ages, allowing others to do with her as they wished. Perhaps long ago she had shifted into a very different state of mind, one in which she was no longer provoked to anger or dismay by our actions, and now feels herself to be a star, pierced through with fire and already smouldering; or a swathe of cloth, boundless and featureless, indifferent to everything, like a stage curtain 10in the darkness. Or, who knows, perhaps she’s amused by the way we assume nothing new will ever come of her, that we continue to expect our daily and yearly deliver­ies of milk and honey like children expecting breakfast, yawning children who scramble to the kitchen and wait for their mother to put bowls of yoghurt or cornflakes on the table in front of them. But what if the bowls suddenly contained scorpions, or writhing grubs, or bluebottles? What if the thermostat was turned right up, so the kitchen was stiflingly hot, or what if frogs rained down from the sky, slapping against the windows? What if a plague on the firstborn began? This is a game that can be kept going for a good while, especially if it begins with almost imperceptible changes: the grass that withers a little early, or the trains that seem to forget the timetable, delayed for hours or else rushing ahead with preternatural speed, only to stand silent on a wide plain, waiting for their allot­ted arrival time.

It was on such a train that the novelist, who went by the name of M, sat waiting, wondering just how late she was going to be. The yellowing fields outside, the net on the seatback with an empty Coke bottle jammed into it, even the occupant of the seat next to hers – all were portents of a delay she could not avoid. Trains now behaved as if they were living creatures, free from human control; all one could do was hope for their good will, although it was unclear how or even whether this differed from the good will of humans. Ticket inspectors had all but disappeared from the trains, and no one seemed to care any longer; you could go a long way without having to show a ticket.

Still, the novelist M, who was travelling from one country to another, confidently expected to arrive at her destination, if not on this train then at least on another. She was armed with a ticket and a seat reservation, and 11she’d picked up an avocado sandwich from one of the more upmarket station kiosks where the bread was fresh and the coffee strong. She’d once heard that an action only needed to be repeated twelve times for a new and enduring habit to be formed. For example, if, after a day’s work, you were to go to a café with a river view and drink a simple glass of white wine, then on the thirteenth evening the habit would suddenly manifest itself, like the head of a seal emerging from the water, and you’d be a new and different person: the sort of person who sits sipping wine in the evening, without really knowing why, waiting for the new words that fit this new life like a glove, and that will in time appear in your mouth together with the taste of wine.

In any case, as M sometimes reflected, they say that the human body has a habit of replacing all its cells with new ones every seven years. After seven years you wake up a completely different person without even noticing and only continue to think of yourself as a familiar and predictable creature because you aren’t paying atten­tion. But then again, she wondered, turning away from the occupant of the seat next to hers with his expanse of newspaper, and looking crossly out of the window, could one really call this behaviour a genuine habit, when in most cases the human body doesn’t manage to renew itself the full twelve times. By the thirteenth you’d be over ninety, a rare achievement for the human organism, and at that age a person is facing inevitable transformation into a handful of ashes in an urn, or a box whose contents we’d prefer not to think about.

She’d certainly passed through the city’s main station twelve or more times. So her desire to join the morning queue for coffee and a paper bag filled with something warm and nourishing (and from one particular kiosk) 12could by now be considered a habit rather than a passing whim; and she herself looked like a woman who knew what she wanted, placing her paper cup decisively into its carton tray and pressing on the correct lid. For M, who hadn’t lived in this city long, precision of movement and the knowledge of one’s future trajectory (the underpass to platform five for northbound trains and platform one for southbound) had a particular importance, as if guaranteeing that she had a place both on the waiting train and the journey towards it, as well as in the new life itself, to which she had not yet been entirely reconciled.

Judging by the number of times she’d had to travel somewhere and work ‘as a novelist’ in different cities and countries and then travel back, pulling her light suitcase easily from the luggage rack each time, then she clearly did have a place in this new life, many places in fact, and in each one people wanted to ask her about the books she had once written; and then, with far more curiosity, about the country she’d come from. This country was currently waging war against a neighbouring country, killing the inhabitants with missiles, with fire from the skies, with bare hands, and yet it still couldn’t conquer it, nor accept that its opponent was not going to offer itself up on a plate.

Sometimes – fairly frequently, in fact – this country of hers also found time to kill its own inhabitants, seem­ing to consider them nothing more than mutinous body parts that had become dangerous distractions from the acts of hunting and feeding. The foreign city where M now lived was full of people fleeing from both countries, and those who’d been attacked by her own compatriots regarded their former neighbours with horror and sus­picion, as if life before the war had ceased to have any meaning and had simply masked a similarity with the devouring beast.13

Many of the people who were native to this foreign city wanted to know more about this beast, not simply to pro­tect themselves from its repulsive maw, but also because big predators interest us, we herbivores, who find it hard to understand where such violence comes from and how it functions. They interrogated the novelist M on the beast’s habits with a sort of anxious compassion, as if she too had been bitten, even half-swallowed, and the fact she had been left lying in the grass, relatively untouched, was only an accident. Some wanted to know how it was possible that the beast hadn’t yet been killed or hadn’t consumed itself in its unbounded greed, and these people hinted that M and those she knew in her country should have taken measures against it long before the beast grew to its present size and began consuming everyone.

M absolutely agreed with this, but she found it hard to explain that the very nature of the beast made it tricky to hunt down or to fight. You see, she might have reasoned, it’s not as if the beast was there in front of me, or even behind me. No, it was all around me, and to such an extent that it’s taken me years to realize that I was living inside it, that I was perhaps even born inside it. Do you remember the story, she continued to herself silently, about the old man and the wooden boy, sitting inside a sea monster with only a stump of tallow candle? They could have caused the monster some discomfort by, say, jumping up and down in its belly or by making a fire. But in our case the disproportionate size of the beast means you can do it no real harm, let alone kill it. The only hope is that one day it will begin to choke and puke, and, without knowing how it happened, you suddenly find yourself on the outside, seeing quite distinctly that the room you spent so long in was in fact its stomach. It so happened that I was a part of a beast, if only because I was swallowed accidentally, or 14grew up inside it by mistake. I understand this means my experience is flawed and my account hardly reliable. Still, if necessary, I am willing to report on the internal fixings of the creature, a creature I left only recently for dry land.

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2.

M now lived in a place overrun with beasts (as well as birds, and among those birds, herons flying low over the lake, so you could clearly see the elegance of their weightless construction) and people who had, it seemed, very little understanding of what one might expect from such beasts. Once when a fox attacked and killed a local swan right in front of the children playing in the lakeside grass, the fox’s shamelessness was discussed at the com­munal dinner table and someone gave the opinion that its behaviour was unacceptable and that something should be done about it. M had no idea how one could prevent a fox from expressing its inner beast and refrained from joining the conversation, fearing she might appear too closely acquainted with the morals of those who ate the living without caring who saw them.

And yet even here there were people who saw things for what they were and took precautions. She was once having a guilty smoke on a bench hidden behind some bushes when a small grey-haired woman emerged from the thicket and demanded to know what M was doing there. She looked official, if a little dishevelled; she wore a fitted uniform, a sort of shiny boiler suit with epaulettes, and indeed she immediately produced identification, a card sealed in cellophane that was already coming unstuck in the damp. M had nothing to show her in turn, except the cigarette, but there must have been something in the novelist’s look that testified to her trustworthiness, and the woman in the uniform immediately began treat­ing her as a potential ally. She was, it seemed, a guardian of the swans that swam from one lake to another, bring­ing up their young, and astonishing passers-by with their titanic grandeur and whiteness; she hadn’t just been 16sitting in the thicket, she’d been keeping watch. She was, she explained, no lone ranger but part of a mighty force of swan watchers who kept guard day and night on the lakes; uniformed volunteers and activists who lay sleepless in hideouts waiting for a predator to attempt to harm the wel­fare of the giant birds. There were forty, all told, she said, puffing out her chest and allowing M to examine a plas­tic wallet containing a collection of dirty swan feathers.

There was something in the manner of Jay Jay (as the woman had asked to be called) that suggested she had in fact no colleagues and that she guarded the lakes alone, despite the references to her fellow keepers and the help that would swiftly arrive should anything happen. She knew how to deal with foxes: there was no point in offer­ing them dog food (although they never turned down cat food) but their favourite snack was a hard-boiled egg. ‘People, though, are another matter,’ she said, looking at M as if she knew something about her, too. People stole eggs from the swans’ nests – who knew for what purpose, per­haps for use in occult rituals. ‘Yes, there’s nothing people wouldn’t do,’ she repeated grimly. ‘A month ago now we found babies – two babies,’ she said, translating her words into English, ‘with knife wounds all over their bel­lies.’ ‘Goodness,’ M squeaked. ‘What did you do, get the police?’ ‘No,’ replied the woman sadly. ‘They were quite dead. We buried them. Two beautiful specimens, hardly even in their first plumage.’

M saw Jay Jay a few times more, circling the lakes, sometimes on a bicycle, sometimes on foot, wearing a high-vis vest over the boiler suit. Once M even tried to report to her a kingfisher she’d seen a day or two before, but Jay Jay was unexpectedly brusque, as if she’d learned something new about humankind, or even about the novelist herself.17

Long-distance trains were a space where humans found themselves in unusual proximity, albeit not as wearyingly tight-pressed as on a crowded platform or on the metro. But in a crowd you at least know that it will soon come to an end and, because you share the space not with a singular other but with a multitude of others who resemble you, it takes a conscious effort to single out any particular person from that crowd, to look properly at them, to consider them for more than a moment. Far easier not to; to use that special absent-minded gaze that registers only distance and movement, the millimetres of air between you and another person’s shoulder, and how everyone is crushed together by the movement of the train, or how the mass of people begins to strain towards the doors as the station approaches.

But on intercity trains you know you’ll almost certainly have to spend long hours cheek-by-jowl with another. Of course you can hope that your carriage will be empty, and the seat beside you, too. Then you can put your jacket and bag on it as if it is yours by rights, as if you have drawn a blind down and only the ticket inspector can look into your lair. Here you are free – no one can reach you – to eat your avocado sandwich and drink your water without looking up from your book, or sleep with your legs outstretched, or sit and watch those around you with vague enmity, as if wearing a cloak of invisibility so you can stare at anyone without inhibition.

Such a cloak had featured in a certain French book that M had once greatly loved. M was just over thirty when she read the book, and the heroine was around fifty, and this fact alone was consoling, like a dress made to grow into. There it was: you could change your life utterly at the age of fifty and start afresh in a way you could never have foreseen. One evening, the heroine, standing outside a 18house in the suburbs, sees her husband kissing another woman under a street lamp. The woman is younger, more capable of arousing desire, as one might say. At this point events take a turn: our heroine waits until her husband goes on a short business trip and while he’s away she sells her parents’ house, where the couple had been living, as well as the furniture, the Bechsteins; she gives away her own books and clothes and packs his shirts and razor into a suitcase to send to his workplace. Then she disappears so entirely she can never be found again. She avoids using bank cards, throws away her mobile phone so her move­ments can’t be traced, and takes circuitous routes, one bus ride after another, going wherever her mood takes her. In every new city she gets rid of the clothes she is wearing and changes the colour of her hair or her hat, and keeps on travelling. The only thing she can’t do is leave Europe, as she would have to show her passport at the border. But she visits the northern lakes, then the Mediterranean islands. She gradually becomes used to a new sensation of security, for which she needs no house or apartment, nor even a roof over her head. Now all she needs to hide her­self is a fissure in a cliff wall where she can shelter from the rain. Or a hooded cloak that she can draw down over her eyes. Or her own eyelids that she can lower in order to see nothing more of the world.

When the life of the novelist M changed (and it did so without her active involvement or even her agreement) she was also around fifty, but she was still waiting for the moment when she could close her eyes and that would be enough to feel at home in the world. It was clearly much harder than the book made it seem, and the cloak itself was not reliable. The seat next to hers was occupied by a man who obviously had the same feeling of suppressed awkwardness, and their conjoined suffering could only 19