Ways to Disappear

by Idra Novey

When I started this novel with Emma leaving western PA, I had no idea that it might take me over a decade to arrive there again in a book with the off-the-grid artist in Take What You Need. This first novel was all about people seeking ways to vanish but ten years later my craving curiously became the opposite, to write about an artist who doesn’t care what the world might think and can’t be bothered to stage a vanishing of herself for anyone.

Having never reduced the trips to anecdotes, she could recall them more intuitively as she worked on her translations.

This line about what gets lost once you tell an anecdote about a place is probably also true of describing an actual place in a work of fiction. Once I’ve written about the sounds and odd sights of a road somewhere, that actual road and the written one converge in my mind, the road as I wrote it becoming part of what I remember when on the actual road again. Does this happen to you, after reading or writing or talking in depth about a specific place and how it differs from elsewhere?

To arrive in Rio was to remember that one had a body and brought it everywhere.

The body, which comes along wherever it’s invited or not! With virtual life continually pulling at us on our phones, it’s easy to forget one has a body. I’ve been surprised at how many people continue to share and circulate this line over the years. I didn’t have my phone with me when I wrote this line in a notebook in Brazil. I wonder if I would have written it if I had my phone in that moment.

How people misunderstand each other is so fascinating to me. Wherever Emma goes, she brings a bit of Pittsburgh with her, but what does that mean? I suspect the meaning is ever shifting, which is what makes cultural misunderstanding such a compelling subject for fiction.

For translation to be an art, she told Emma, you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an artist makes.

If there is anything that aligns all three of my novels it is likely the desire stated here. I crave the company of invented characters capable of genuine transgression. Private acts of transgression. Not performative ones for others.

What about knowing what a writer had never written down—wasn’t that the real knowledge of who she was?

Unwritten books. Unrealized art. The unmade has such power. What art are we missing and from who and at what stage of life? Many awards exist for people under 35 or under 40. But what about celebrating art and writing from people who come to it later, full of lived experiences that enrich the work they make, like the brilliant Irish novelist Louise Kennedy who was a chef for twenty years before writing fiction?

She pulled out her notebook to steady herself with a little fantasy, to disappear for just a moment into the relief of make-believe—into the plea hidden in every fiction for immortality.

Do others feel the pull of mortality when adding words to a notebook? You never know with written words which ones might be the ones that speak for you most someday in the minds of others.

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? To arrive, at least once, at a moment this intimate and singular, which would not be possible without these words arranged in this order on this page?

I recently relived this splendor again translating the prose of Chilean writer Nona Fernandez. Rearranging words does not seem like a form of transfixing intimacy with another person, and yet it is! Trying to intuit why they chose one word or phrase before another, it's like trying to replicate the gate of a person's walk down the street, the length of their stride.

And if her fingers failed to comply, if what she wrote wasn’t worth typing up, who would ever know? She was alone with all the hours of her life.

With social media and smart phones, being alone with the hours of my life feels more elusive, something that isn't guaranteed unless I deliberately make it happen, hide the phone or go somewhere without reception. It's absurd and yet so necessary to remember that it's not necessity for others to know what we write or think. We are alone with our hours and art doesn't have to be about anyone else's hypothetical perception of it. To reflect on this line now, years later, was revelatory today, how long I've been thinking about the appeal of forgetting the rest of the world and making art for the sheer joy of it, alone, from this first book to the novel I just finished, about an artist off the grid entirely.