The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale

From the renowned Russian author of In Memory of Memory comes a haunting meditation on identity, exile, language, art, and the fragile desire to disappear.

The writer M has been living in exile in the city of B since her homeland declared war on a neighbouring state. Wracked by shame and despair, and severed from her language, M finds herself unable to write, unmoored in a present where the future feels unknowable. When she is invited to give a reading at a literary festival in a nearby country, a strange turn of events occurs. After a series of missed connections and mishaps during her trip, including losing her phone, she finds herself stranded and untraceable in an unfamiliar coastal town.

Cut off from everyone she knows, M feels a sense of freedom and 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, and reinvention feels within reach. 

In this brief interlude, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, her past, and 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.

Praise for The Disappearing Act

“The Disappearing Act unfolds with the logic of an allegorical dream: strange, wounding, insistently itself. It is a fable, a vision, a political indictment, and a meditation on language corrupted by authoritarianism. Some very rare books work inside like a splinter or a lost memory, and remain long after they are finished. This is one.” —Kate Cayley, author of Property and How You Were Born

“M is a novelist in exile from her war-mongering homeland, set adrift in the unstable narrative arc that is Maria Stepanova’s sumptuous fever dream, The Disappearing Act. Missed connections, a lost phone charger, a magic act, tarot cards, old adages and stories, newly minted words, crystal balls, and lost memories are strewn across the text like oracles for us to try and fail to decode. We do not know we have fallen in love with M until our ardour causes us to hold our breath at the finale. The Disappearing Act is an opulent magic trick of a novel.” —Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Wait Softly Brother

“Sasha Dugdale has given us a gorgeous, lucid translation of this compelling novel by Maria Stepanova. The Disappearing Act is a dreamlike tale of exile and estrangement, of getting lost and contemplating staying that way. It’s witty, surprising, and strangely exhilarating.” —Aimee Wall, author of We, Jane

“The Disappearing Act is a witty, unsettling, and profound reflection on belonging and estrangement.” —Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature

Press Coverage

“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

“Stepanova’s prose work is discursive, expansively imaginative in its musings and digressions. The translation by Dugdale is lucid, vivid, and fluid.” —Barbara Conaty, Library Journal

“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

“‘There was so much guilt around M, and in her, that it was hard to breathe’—over the past four years, this sentiment has become familiar to many Russians opposing the war in Ukraine… Wherever her escapade brings her next, she is proof that it takes a novelist with poetic imagination to capture the nature of the beast.” —Anna Aslanyan, Guardian

“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, Financial Times

“Beautifully suffocating…A gem of literature.” —Madeline Schultz, Chicago Review of Books

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

Read an Excerpt from The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova (translated by Sasha Dugdale) —Open Book

Spring books preview: 39 titles to add to your reading list —Globe and Mail