Ways To Disappear

by Idra Novey

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism

Synopsis

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize in Fiction

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction

NPR Best Book of 2016
Buzzfeed Best Debut of 2016
BUST Magazine Best Book of 2016

Winner of the 2016 Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize for Fiction

New York Times Editors' Choice

2016 Barnes & Noble Discover selection

"An elegant page-turner....Charges forward with the momentum of a bullet." --New York Times Book Review

For fans of Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, an inventive, brilliant debut novel about the disappearance of a famous Brazilian novelist and the young translator who turns her life upside down to follow her author's trail.

Beatriz Yagoda was once one of Brazil's most celebrated authors. At the age of sixty, she is mostly forgotten-until one summer afternoon when she enters a park in Rio de Janeiro, climbs into an almond tree, and disappears.

When her devoted translator Emma hears the news in wintry Pittsburgh, she flies to the sticky heat of Rio. There she joins the author's son and daughter to solve the mystery of Yagoda's disappearance and satisfy the demands of the colorful characters left in her wake, including a loan shark with a debt to collect and the washed-up editor who launched Yagoda's career. What they discover is how much of her they never knew.

Exquisitely imagined and as profound as it is suspenseful, Ways to Disappear is at once a thrilling story of intrigue and a radiant novel of self-reckoning.

Release date: February 9, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 224

Sample

By the time they reached the Pittsburgh airport, Emma was thinking in Portuguese. Beside her, Miles went on exploding in English about what an unnecessary escapade this trip was. It’s so impulsive, he said, when we have a wedding to pay for.

Emma let him blast on. She was tired of explaining. She didn’t just know Beatriz’s books. She knew the melon color of her author’s bathrobe and which side of the sofa Beatriz preferred when she curled up to read. For the last seven years, Emma had been making an annual pilgrimage with her yearly stipend for language research to see her author. She planned the trips well in advance, and Miles had never given her a hard time about them. He’d never asked much about them either, which she’d come to appreciate. Having never reduced the trips to anecdotes, she could recall them more intuitively as she worked on her translations. She’d remember a morning in Rio as no more than an orange glow over the ocean and use that light to illuminate the strange, dark boats of Beatriz’s images as she ferried them into English.

Miles was wrong. She knew Beatriz too intimately not to go and help now. What if no one else thought of the scene in one of Beatriz’s earliest stories with the warden who disappears into a tree? Emma couldn’t recall the title of it with Miles continuing to detonate beside her in the car. But she was certain that she’d remember it once she was alone in the airport.

And indeed, in the security line, the title came to her. “A Lua Nova.” The New Moon. Once she’d recalled the name, she remembered the whole story, the island with nothing on it but a prison and an orchestra of three-toed lizards that serenade the inmates each night with samba and maracatu. The story was about a mute inmate who whittled chicken bones and the warden who fell in love with him and then poisoned the prisoner, hoping that would extinguish his longing.

But there was a second warden in the story, too. A minor character who climbed a palm tree outside the walls to listen to the lizards and found the distance so freeing, sitting there elevated and unseen, away from the other wardens and their prisoners, that he never came down.

Or maybe there was a suggestion that something more happened in the tree—Emma couldn’t remember. She’d have to find the story when she got to Beatriz’s apartment. If not, the friend who’d been kind enough to write to her about her author’s disappearance would surely have a copy of the collection. Beatriz had never mentioned anyone named Flamenguinho, but he clearly knew Beatriz well enough to know how close she was to Emma. He knew what an asset her American translator would be in a crisis like this. They were going to meet for drinks at Emma’s hotel as soon as she landed. She was so eager to feel the honeyed lilt of Portuguese in her mouth again, the breeze off the Atlantic on her skin.

When she finally emerged from Rio’s Galeão International Airport, she took in the familiar stink of armpits, car exhaust, and guavas that assaulted her as she stepped out of the baggage claim and the outside air pressed in. Already she could feel her dress adhering to her arms and lower back. After so much winter, the sticky sensation, the rising odors were glorious. To arrive in Rio was to remember that one had a body and brought it everywhere.

Her cabdriver had a body as well, much of it on display beneath his pink muscle shirt, all of it glistening with sweat. When he asked her where she’d learned Portuguese, she told him about Beatriz.

But you must want to translate the real greats, he said, masters like Jorge Amado and Carlos Drummond.

So she told him about the warden in the tree, the island prison with its night orchestra of lizards, how it was one of those stories so strange and spare that it felt like a whispered, secret history of the world.

Oh, I know it. The Devil’s Cauldron, the driver said.

No, I believe she called it “The New Moon,” Emma replied.

I’m talking about the prison, he said. It gets hot as a pot of hell there on Ilha Grande.



Ilha what? I can’t understand your accent.

Flamenguinho let out a belch so explosive his eyes bulged like a toad’s. At the eruption, several people at the bar turned around slack-jawed. Emma couldn’t imagine Beatriz seeking out the company of such a man. Besides his belching problem, he had what appeared to be a tattoo of a trash can on his neck.

He also kept posing his questions to her breasts. Who’s helping her on Ilha Grande? he asked her shirt.

Well, I think it has more to do with this early story of hers, Emma said. It takes place on—

Rerp! Another belch detonated, and with such force that Flamenguinho had to grab hold of the table.

Listen, he said to her breasts, fuck the story. You know what I want? I want the six hundred thousand fucking dollars she owes me. Okay? I know she’s broke. So you need to get the damn book from her. Whatever you get for it in your country, half a million is mine, and then I won’t have to kill her.

Emma looked down at her hands. Her fingers had come together in what her yoga teachers called the bind. It didn’t seem like the time to explain that Elsewhere Press was just a woman named Judie in upstate New York and various interns from a small university nearby. For each book Judie published, she’d paid Emma the same amount she’d paid Beatriz: five hundred dollars. To make a living, Emma taught endless sections of “Portuguese for Spanish Speakers” at a branch campus of the University of Pittsburgh.

Her fingers still bound, she asked Flamenguinho how he’d gotten hold of her email, and he flared his nostrils.

See this? He opened his jacket to reveal the gun-shaped bulge in the left inside pocket. It would be deadly, he said, for you to assume I’m an idiot. I found you online like any other asshole, and if you sell her book and send me the money I won’t have to find you again. You hear what I’m saying?

Beset with a slight sensation of vertigo, Emma nodded. Of the various scenarios in which she’d imagined herself in Rio, receiving a threat of this nature was not one of them. She’d also never imagined her author as someone who would conceal an addiction, and certainly not to gambling. She’d translated every emotion Beatriz had ever written. They’d discussed hundreds of words and why Beatriz had chosen them over others. They’d sipped coffee together in their pajamas. Emma had gradually come to trust her understanding of her author’s impulses more than she did her own. If she couldn’t find Beatriz, she couldn’t find anyone.

I think I have an idea of where she might be, Emma told the shark sitting before her. If she’s finished the book, I’ll translate it as fast as I can. Whatever it makes in the U.S. is yours. I promise.



Raquel let her brother open the door for Emma. She hadn’t wanted to deal with her mother’s translator yet, but Marcus said that Emma had come such a long way to help them. If she was eager to speak to them, they really couldn’t say no.

Raquel didn’t agree, but then she’d never understood why her mother let Emma stay in the guest room. A translator wasn’t family and her mother never referred to Emma as a friend. Yet every June her mother’s translator arrived, and so thin and high-strung it was impossible to relax when she was in the apartment. Her sunscreen was a problem, too. During Emma’s visits, the living room would begin to reek of those American lotions with an excess of zinc.

The stor. . .