Maria Stepanova | The Diappearing Act

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.

‘Essential… Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the present’s failure to learn lessons from the past. The Disappearing Act, expertly translated by Sasha Dugdale, is the dreamlike testimony of a novelist, known simply as M, who is witnessing from exile her country of origin’s invasion of a separate sovereign state. Creatively and psychologically paralysed by the horrors of war seen at a distance, M can no longer write; every innocuous image becomes superimposed with horror, and so she retreats into self-erasure and memory in order to survive, never mind evolve.’
— Catherine Taylor

‘The Disappearing Act is about what happens when the story of one’s life cleaves in uncomfortable, incongruous ways…. Much of the novel exists on this symbolic plane. But Stepanova is equally adept at building a physical world that evokes the experience of exile…. If there is a through-line to Stepanova’s work, it is not some grand, totalizing vision but rather the habit of looking closely at what falls through the cracks.’
— Matthew Jannet

‘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

‘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

‘The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement.’
— Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

‘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