Lost in translation
It’s common for authors to casually employ metaphors of motherhood when discussing their books. A book is an author’s “baby.” On Twitter, writers wish each other “happy book birthday” on their books’ publication dates. But what’s more complicated than an author’s relationship to her book is the paradoxical relationship between a translator and her translated text, something that she’s both written and not written. Idra Novey’s elegant, comic debut novel, “Ways to Disappear,” considers intertwined questions of translation, authorial identity and the relationship between mothers and daughters.
The novel opens as celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda climbs into an almond tree with her suitcase and cigar, and disappears. Far away in Pittsburgh, Emma Neufield, a translator of Beatriz’s books, receives an e-mail from a mysterious sender informing her of the disappearance. When she arrives in Rio to help search for Beatriz, she is threatened by the sender: Flamenguinho, a loan shark to whom Beatriz owes $600,000, borrowed to support her secret online gambling addiction.
Neither Beatriz’s intense daughter, Raquel, nor Raquel’s brother, Marcus, an Adonis, has ever read their mother’s magic realist, experimental books. For her part, Raquel “had no patience for the illusion that you could know someone because you knew her novels. What about knowing what a writer had never written down — wasn’t that the real knowl- edge of who she was?” She finds Emma’s claim that her mother was an online gambler preposterous. But Marcus checks Beatriz’s computer browser history — the claim is true.
Following a hunch based on one of Beatriz’s early stories, Emma and Marcus ferry to the island of Ilha Grande, winding up in the gossip pages as an item. Meanwhile, Beatriz’s idealistic first publisher, Roberto Rocha, receives a pseudonymous letter from the author requesting money to hide out in a hotel.
“Ways to Disappear” gallops forward, gracefully bending genres of mystery, romance and noir, while considering philosophical ideas and telling a fun, entertaining story besides. A poet with two collections under her belt, Novey uses a light, sensitive touch and a giddy sense of play to explore weighty concepts. Witty dictionary entries, news clippings and the plots of Yagoda’s stories punctuate the narrative, and two crucial plot points are rendered as poetry.
The clues that Emma, Marcus and Raquel follow in trying to locate Beatriz seem to be smart, metafictive allusions to the life of famous Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. Like Beatriz, Lispector was mythically beautiful, Jewish and born elsewhere before coming to Brazil at age 2. Cockroaches appear at the novel’s climax. Novey translated Lispector’s unforgettable experimental novel “The Passion According to G.H.” — also featuring a cockroach — for New Directions.
At one point, Beatriz’s first publisher, Rocha, disillusioned after years in the business, considers what he seeks in fiction. It is the same mix of dark gravity and suppleness that he looks for in steaks: “He tested for density as well, for something tender in the middle yet still heavy enough to blacken the air.” He could very well be describing the heady, lush pleasure found in “Ways to Disappear,” a novel whose powers of enchantment rival those of its fictional author.