Ways To Disappear

Ways To Disappear written by Idra Novey is a light fun story about an author who has lived life beyond her means and now decides to disappear rather than face her creditors.  She leaves behind her publisher, her translator and her children to pick up the pieces.

Her American translator, a young woman named Emma, flies from Pittsburgh, PA to Brazil to help track down author, Beatriz Yagoda.  She feels that having translated all Beatriz's novels has given her incite into where Beatriz may have disappeared off to.  Emma is also escaping her own personal life in America.  The cold winters and an engagement she is not sure she wants to continue.  Emma teams up with siblings Raquel and Marcus to help find their mother.  They are shocked to learn that their mother has incurred major gambling debts.

In a humorous style, author Novey, builds a sense of mystery as a hitman comes looking to collect the debt Beatriz Yagoda has accumulated from the loan shark.  The characters are involved in romance, kidnapping and ransom as they search for the illusive author, who the longer she remains hidden the more her novels build in popularity.  Her longtime editor reissues her original books and edits her latest manuscript.  As a translator, Emma feels that her life is lived quietly in the shadows.  Never the center of attention, always interpreting someone else's words.  "And wasn't the splendor of translation this very thing - to discover sentences this beautiful and then have the chance to make someone else hear their beauty who had yet to hear it?"  Later in the novel, Emma also describes the role of the translator as someone who helped clarify to the reader the author's intent, "A translator could justify moving around the objects in a sentence if it made it easier for her audience to grasp what was going on.  She could even change an object into something more familiar to the reader to avoid baffling him with something he wouldn't understand."

Written using short chapters, some laying out the story as it unfolds, some giving us dictionary style definitions that explain a plot point.  There are chapters that are written as news reports, moving the story to another direction and emails written to Emma by the fiancee she left behind in Pittsburgh.Then either to make light of a dramatic scene or for emphasis at one point, Novey, writes in poetry verse. All these varied styles make reading the novel more enjoyable.