Essential Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the presents 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 origins 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, Irish Times The Disappearing Act is about what happens when the story of ones 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 Stepanovas work, it is not some grand, totalizing vision but rather the habit of looking closely at what falls through the cracks.
Matthew Janney, Financial Times M describes the country she comes from as a beast waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the authors biographical note. Maria Stepanova whose masterly In Memory of Memory combined family memoir, essay and fiction left her native Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We might also wonder how closely The Disappearing Act tracks her own life. But the novelist M is not here to discuss autofiction she has more important things to reflect on. 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 Essential Written with deep insight, despair and an intrinsic sense of the alarming recurrence of the presents 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 origins 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, Irish Times The success of The Disappearing Act lies in how these diverting scenes inform larger questions about what makes us who we are when were without possessions and places and work, or how we categorize people in the absence of other identifiers, through nationality, for example The Disappearing Act toys with the reader through oppositions and contradictions. Its setting is both specific and general; it draws on the authors own experiences but places her alter ego in increasingly fanciful scenarios. But 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, New York Times Stepanovas wonderful In Memory of Memory was a weighty consideration of family legacy through objects and images; at first, this slim novella of disconnection appears markedly different. But a similar dream-like atmosphere prevails, and there are also thematic resemblances. Even as she fantasizes of obliteration, M is pulled back to the past. But this time, these memories are tinged with horror, inevitably and rapidly leading M to think about the beast and its workings.
Rachel Andrews, Irish Times Stepanova deliberately withholds clear answers, and this ambiguity is what makes The Disappearing Act so compelling. It is driven by uncertainty, the unwillingness to face oneself, and the sense that ones language and, of course, their whole world by proxy is collapsing beneath ones feet. [ T]he novel can be marked as one of the first major works of the new Russian literature, a cogent exploration that is never prescriptive nor totalizing, but simply captures something of the diffuse, unfinished, and hopelessly divided moment.
Sam Bowden, Asymptote 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 writers 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 ones vitality in the face of injustice. Its a stunner.
Publishers Weekly, starred review Extraordinary a work of haunting power, grace and originality.
Philippe Sands, author of East West Street (praise for In Memory of Memory) Intentionally the memoir is meandering, digressive, cumulative, compendious a mind moving around its wide world. Dugdales translation appears heroic, to this reader with no Russian, in its sustained careful attentiveness. [ S]o much of what Stepanova has saved for us is remarkable and rich with meaning.
Tessa Hadley, Guardian (praise for In Memory of Memory) A luminous, rigorous, and mesmerizing interrogation of the relationship between personal history, family history, and capital-H History. I couldnt 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 (praise for In Memory of Memory) There is simply no book in contemporary Russian literature like In Memory of Memory ... [ 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 (praise for In Memory of Memory) Stepanovas tour de force blends memoir, literary criticism, essay and fiction. Although this is a personal and intimate work using photographs, postcards and diaries, it succeeds in mining a universal theme in contemporary Russian cultural life: how does a family or a country process the events of the past 100 years?
Viv Groskop, Guardian (praise for In Memory of Memory) Dazzling erudition and deep empathy come together in Maria Stepanovas 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 Seeing Further (praise for In Memory of Memory) This remarkable account of the authors Russian-Jewish family expands into a reflection on the role of art and ethics in informing memory. Stepanova is both sensitive and rigorous.
New Yorker (praise for In Memory of Memory)
