Novey's novel delivers on its promises in so many ways. Yes, there's carnage, but there's also exuberant love, revelations of long-buried, unhappy secrets, ruminations about what makes a satisfying life, a publisher's regrets about moral compromises in both his work and his use of his family wealth and connections, and an alternately heartfelt and wry portrait of the satisfactions and anxieties of the generally underappreciated art of translation.
Ms. Novey sustains suspense throughout with beautifully restrained prose. Yet her narrative is more than a mystery — it’s about language itself, both the yearning for comprehension and the desire to feel understood.
“Ways to Disappear gallops forward, gracefully bending genres of mystery, romance and noir, while considering philosophical ideas and telling a fun, entertaining story besides. 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.
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.
Ways to Disappear defies convention and categorization, effortlessly careening from magical realism to noir, reckless romance to metafictional dictionary definitions. The result is a story as propulsive as it is compelling.
Using her poet's—and translator's—precision, Novey seeds her story with crystalline images, like perfect little dioramas through which her characters move...More than entertaining and deftly written, though it most certainly is those things, Ways to Disappear sweats the questions we should be asking, of ourselves, our art, our culture, our assumptions, about hanging somewhere in between knowing and not knowing, about responsibility and accountability. Novey has crafted a delightfully metafictional and metatranslational exploration into the creation and appreciation of literature, and about choosing to live a meaningful life, whatever that means to each of us.
Novey’s scattershot plotting is reminiscent of Paul Auster in his weaker tales, with madcap gangsterish encounters suddenly producing, unconvincingly, real and terrible consequences. But she offsets that fault with moments of sly, lovely writing, many of them exploring the nature of a translator’s odd invisible art, and in Raquel, Beatriz’s hard-bitten daughter, she has created a heart-rending portrait of the price someone always ends up paying for genius.
...veers from flummoxed absurdity to macabre violence in a way reminiscent of a Coen brothers movie ... Absences and omissions, the unspoken and the unspeakable, carry much of the weight in this spare, witty riddle of a novel. For Ms. Novey’s characters, it isn’t just Beatriz who has gone missing, but some deeper truth essential to their self-knowledge.
With touches of mystery, commentary about the art of translating as well as inventing fiction, prose that reads like poetry as well as snatches of actual poems, and wry inter-chapter definitions, Ways to Disappear is a gem.
As zany as the story is, there is a blade of darkness to the plot of Ways to Disappear, a particular edge that makes it not quite so summery as it first appears. Novey’s keen word choices and a kidnapping (complete with a severed ear) give the novel such a clear-cut black-and-white divide between the good and the bad that it feels woven from the same fabric as a 1940s noir.
The novel starts off comic and wacky but turns menacingly dark. Soon, center stage, there is a kidnapping, an ear in a shoebox, bodyguards and ransom notes. This movement across tones and genres—farce, comedy, mystery, romance—offers plenty of surprises. You can disappear for hours in Novey’s original story.
As zany as the story is, there is a blade of darkness to the plot of Ways to Disappear, a particular edge that makes it not quite so summery as it first appears. Novey’s keen word choices and a kidnapping (complete with a severed ear) give the novel such a clear-cut black-and-white divide between the good and the bad that it feels woven from the same fabric as a 1940s noir.
