Review by New York Times Review
A NOVEL STARRING a novelist can often seem a little pleased with itself, as if the author is looking over her shoulder, eager to make a great drama from a greatly uneventful thing. So it was with some trepidation that I picked up "Ways to Disappear," the first novel by the poet and translator Idra Novey. The protagonist, Emma Neufeld, is a Portuguese-to-English translator devoted to the work of a cult-classic Brazilian writer. Novey herself translates from Portuguese to English, most recently the work of Clarice Lispector, the cult-classic Brazilian writer. But Novey has wholly eluded the hazards of writing about writers. Instead, this lush and tightly woven novel manages to be a meditation on all forms of translation while still charging forward with the momentum of a bullet. The novel opens with Beatriz Yagoda, a Brazilian novelist to whom Emma has devoted her career, climbing into an almond tree with a suitcase and a cigar. It's the last time she's seen. When news of her disappearance reaches Emma in Pittsburgh, she takes one look at her boyfriend, whose most pressing concern is "when they might get married, and whether they had to invite everyone from their Road Runners group," and books a flight to Rio de Janeiro to find her beloved writer. "To leave a person capable of such meticulous devotion was difficult." Yet Emma, as withdrawn as she is headstrong, manages to do just that. Emma begins racking her intimate knowledge of Beatriz's entire oeuvre for clues about where she might have gone. Luckily, a friend of Beatriz's, Flamenguinho, has gotten in touch, and they arrange to have drinks at her hotel. He turns out to be a loan shark who knows Beatriz is broke but assumes that the publication of her next book in America will solve her $600,000 debt to him. Flamenguinho, who keeps "posing his questions to her breasts" and has a tattoo of a trash can on his neck, is grossly misinformed about the profit margins on translated fiction in America. "Whatever you get for it in your country," he says, "half a million is mine, and then I won't have to kill her." Though Beatriz is a writer of enough acclaim in Brazil to be tabloid fodder, her tiny American publisher, the perfectly named Elsewhere Press, pays $500 a book. Novey writes with cool precision and breakneck pacing - all of this transpires in only 14 pages of text, with some chapters almost lean enough to fit on a Post-it. We next meet Beatriz's children: a territorial and suspicious daughter, Raquel, and Marcus, a bartending charmer with a "sensual and sleepy" gaze. Raquel resents Emma's infatuation with her mother, lacking any "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 knowledge of who she was?" Unfortunately for Raquel, she gets an answer to this question. As Emma, Raquel and Beatriz's long-time publisher and editor, Roberto Rocha, search for the vanished writer, it becomes clear they are each looking for their own version of the same woman, just as a translator sees her own version of a text. Emma seeks her idol; Raquel, her unreliable mother; and Rocha, a writer he's had more of a role in shaping than either the daughter or translator realizes. Marcus alone seems to seek nothing. OF COURSE, all their definitions of Beatriz must fall apart, and this unraveling comes in the discovery of her novel-in-progress. Though Raquel had "always known that if she read her mother's fiction, it would be devastating or alienating or both," she gives in, and the revelations are worse than expected. Emma is also heartbroken by the messy draft, only then realizing how much influence her editor had on defining Beatriz's style. Being defined is being controlled; even deification is a manipulation. And just as Raquel and Emma must see Beatriz's complete and fallible humanity, Emma has to shed her dopey boyfriend and his narrow definitions of who she is. "What you're doing down there is not your life," he says in an email. These brief, dire emails come in their own little chapters, as do fiction-infused dictionary entries. After the consummation of Marcus and Emma's affair is the entry for "Between," with the story folded into the usage examples: "between the two of them," "between an author and her son," "between a brief tunnel in Rio and the distant Pittsburgh of one's cats." Another series of chapters are excerpts from Radio Globo's coverage of Beatriz Yagoda's disappearance, showing yet another version of her story. While most of these formal experiments enriched the novel's investigation of definitions dispensed and lived under, one lost me. In a pivotal scene Novey shifted abruptly into a poem that felt overdramatic and muddled crucial action. I reread it in confusion instead of with the pleasure I felt through the rest of this elegant page-turner. And though it begins as a farce, complete with a comic interruption of midcoital lovers, it gradually takes a serious turn - guns go off, fires burn, a human ear is delivered in a shoe box. Beatriz flees to escape this violence, but in a deeper sense she is trying to slough off the varied definitions placed on her and her work, vanishing to be seen again.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 28, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
In this short first novel, poet and translator Novey tells a fast-paced, supremely engaging story of characters with good intentions who quickly get in over their heads. When popular Brazilian author Beatriz Yagoda goes missing, her American translator, Emma, embarks on a poorly planned journey to find her. Easy enough, she thinks, only to find herself at odds with Yagoda's business-minded daughter, Raquel, and completely infatuated with Marcus, the author's son. The trio runs in circles in their search, until a tough-talking loan shark shows up and proves he means business when a second member of the Yagoda clan disappears. Novey's narration switches from Emma to the Yagodas to Beatriz's frantic publisher and is interspersed by snippets of news reports, dictionary entries, and email exchanges between Emma and her increasingly suspicious life partner back home in Pittsburgh. Novey's characters are hilariously impulsive, terribly misguided, hopelessly lost, relentlessly determined, and immediately sympathetic. An incisive meditation on the relationship between literature and life, a reflection on the cumulative result of everyday decisions, and a dazzling, truly memorable work of humor and heart.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet and translator Novey's briskly paced first novel is a clever literary mystery and a playful portrait of the artist as a young translator. Novey depicts her heroine, Emma, becoming embroiled in the life of an enigmatic Brazilian author, Beatriz Yagoda, whose books she has translated for years. When Beatriz, last seen puffing on a cigar and perched on a tree branch with a suitcase, goes missing, Emma leaves Pittsburgh, Pa., and her stick-in-the-mud fiancé behind to fly to Rio and find Beatriz, the author of works "so strange and spare that it felt like a whispered, secret history of the world." Emma is convinced that these works, along with a cryptic, unfinished manuscript left behind, could elucidate the mystery of Beatriz's whereabouts. The search is conducted alongside Beatriz's two adult children, one who resents the "gangly tourist" and the other who seduces her, and it has its share of violence and romance-it reads like an Ali Smith novel with a fun Brazilian noir vibe. But underlying these comic noir elements is an eloquent meditation on the art and anxiety of translation, as well as a story about literature as a means of revelation and concealment: who ultimately knows more about the secretive missing woman, the translator intimately familiar with her writing or the children who have never finished any of her books? Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] Humor, poignancy, passion, and a bit of magic are all elements of this delightful debut novel. An award-winning poet and translator, Novey blends mystery with romance as she describes the zany search for award-winning Brazilian novelist Beatriz Yagoda. Her adult children, Raquel and Marcus, and devoted American translator Emma begin searching for the eccentric author after she is last seen, suitcase and cigar in hand, climbing into an almond tree in the coastal town of Copacabana. The threesome must also attempt to thwart the zealous and belching Brazilian gangster seeking repayment of Beatriz's gambling debts or else suffer bodily harm. Verdict Novey's tightly drawn, superbly funny tale offers not only glimpses into modern Brazilian life and culture but also insights into the creative process of authors and translators. A quick read, largely because it is hard to put down. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/15.]-Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A famous novelist's disappearance upends the life of her American translator. Novey's surreal debut begins as a mystery: legendary Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda has inexplicably climbed into an almond tree with a cigar and a suitcase and has not been seen since. Upon receiving the newsis she aware, an unfamiliar emailer wants to know, that her author has been missing for five days?translator Emma Neufeld puts her life in Pittsburgh on hold and hops a flight to Rio de Janeiro to join the search, much to the chagrin of her sweetly dull boyfriend. On the ground in Rio, the situation quickly begins to clarify: Beatriz Yagoda is not only a serious literary novelist, but also a serious online poker player who now owes an angry loan shark half a million dollars, or else. And so, together with Yagoda's adult children, Raquel (practical) and Marcus (overwhelmingly handsome), Emma embarks on a madcap chase to track down the missing author while fending off the increasingly impatient shark. Meanwhile, Yagoda's publisher, Roberto Rocha, burned out by a sea of lesser manuscripts and desperate for another one of hers, finds himself equally entangled: he doesn't know any more about her whereabouts than Emma and the rest, but he's been the one responding to her secret requests for cash, andmore importantlyhe's the one with the means to pay off her debts. Stylish, absurd, sometimes romantic, and often very funny, the novel is as much about the writing process as it is about the high-stakes plot. And if it doesn't always add up to more than the sum of its partslike a dream, the book is almost overwhelmingly vivid when you're in it, and the details dissipate quickly when you're nottaken piece by piece, it's a tour de force. Delightful and original. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
