The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova review – a poetic exploration of Russian guilt | Fiction

M, a 50-year-old novelist living in an idyllic place by a lake, is travelling to a literary festival to give a talk. A sequence of events, mostly beyond her control, leaves her stranded in an unfamiliar town. It’s dead quiet, except for a travelling circus camped on the outskirts. M checks into a hotel, ignores her phone and wanders around, reminiscing about books read, films watched, museums visited. Some of these recollections are grounded in fable; others are vividly realistic. Among the latter are memories of her childhood and youth, spent in a “country that no longer exists apart from on old maps and in history books”.

M describes the country she comes from as a “beast” waging war against its neighbour. We can guess her meaning without turning to the author’s 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.

What was it like inside the beast? “She’d lived her whole life … doing nothing, or doing only what came naturally to her, and wanting to believe she had got away with it.” Was it wrong of her to enjoy her life there? She understands that “joy was the very thing the beast was bent on annihilating … and that it was important to keep it alive to spite the beast”, but that’s little consolation now that her former compatriots are killing others “with missiles, with fire from the sky, with bare hands”.

M’s relationship with the legacy of her one-time homeland – first and foremost, its language – is inevitably compromised. One of the stories she retells, the tale of a linguist whose tongue is cut out before he can use it, could be about herself. But the book’s laconic style, with distant echoes of poetry, skilfully conveyed by translator Sasha Dugdale, shows that M still has the power of telling.

True to the novel’s title, M’s presence gradually diminishes, starting from her realisation that she is “cut off, a spare limb”. Watching young lovers, “she felt as if these things no longer affected her; the economy of erotic selection and exchange bore no relation to her current existence”. Served bread in a cafe, she leaves it on the plate before suddenly forcing it into her mouth, as if trying to convince herself that she is hungry and therefore still there. These transformations may be alarming, but when “her inner self … gradually quietened, becoming soft, childlike”, it brings a sense of freedom and possibility. Part of her longs to recreate the dream in which “she was on a train to the dacha, the years falling away from her as she travelled” until she was a small child again.

Her mother once told her about a sign reading “There is no way out”: M considers her own exit strategy. Can she find a “novel way out of a hopeless situation”? With no set plan, she visits the circus and offers to help perform a magic act. It involves lying in a sarcophagus with her knees up to her chin, which she finds “boring and painful” though not hard. The owner of the circus asks her if she is a Jew, and M, happily discarding her “Russian novelist” identity, says yes.

The world has labelled her a writer, yet she wants to be seen as herself – whatever that might be – and the circus promises a chance of that. She leaves most of her possessions behind and sets off to join the troupe. She’ll walk through the empty town; she’ll start again at the beginning. It’s not too late, is it?

“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. Authors such as Mikhail Shishkin have spoken about collective guilt in their nonfiction; a “common enough motif”, as M says of yet another remembered story. Wherever her escapade brings her next, she is proof that it takes a novelist with poetic imagination to capture the nature of the beast.