You sit down to eat breakfast. The sun is shining. The sky is blue. You pick up your spoon. You eat scalpels. Maggots. The maggots squirm upon your tongue. You swallow them down.

For years – maybe since the day you were born – life has been like this. Some days less. Some days more. By now you barely even notice. What would you do? Would you care?

That is the question Maria Stepanova’s novel asks. Written in Germany after the author was exiled from her native Russia, The Disappearing Act was published in 2024 as Фокус, pronounced “focus” and meaning “trick” or “sleight of hand”. It is about a woman, M, whose sense of self is haunted by the biggest trickster of all, “the beast”.

Waging war upon a less powerful neighbour, “the beast” touches “everyone who had ever lived in the land where she was born”. Like God and death, the beast is inescapable.

Sound like Putin’s Russia? Maybe. But the beast is bigger than that. The beast is life’s violent contour. The force of uncontained power. How it can nestle inside one’s language, one’s voice, one’s being.

Stepanova’s decision to anonymise the novel’s detail feels like defiance. State censors, if not readers themselves, often hunger for names. Wanna see me in M? Stepanova seems to ask. That’s your prerogative.

M does not want to be called upon to account for the beast’s whims and dispositions. She calls herself a “Russian novelist” and is hailed as one by certain occasions – like the literary festival she is on her way to attend in an unnamed European town. But she is uncomfortable identifying as a novelist. Stranded before she can arrive at the festival, she imagines herself like the Soviet emigrant in Nabokov’s tale The Visit to the Museum, suddenly transported to Leningrad. She senses that, so long as others are destroyed by the beast, she cannot be saved. Named for the industrial waste caused by lead mining – pollution that accelerated rapidly in Stalin’s Russia – the American noise rock band Chat Pile captures the anguish M feels: “From the time you were born it was over.”

Stranded, M leaves her old life behind. She feels her inner self cease “banging itself against the walls in search of an exit”. Discarding nearly everything – her suitcase, phone, copies of the book she is promoting, even her passport and name – she wonders if “the only way to get rid of the beast was to get rid of oneself”.

Her decision to give up her old life could be read as renewal. Or obliteration. Encountering strangers – including a travelling circus – M fantasises about escape from the confusion of her old life. But the collective, the crowd, is not what it appears: among them, people may hold authority and never be made accountable. Think, in Australia, of Nauru. Think of the collective theft of land that gave birth to the nation. Tellingly, M confuses the name of her hotel – Petuh – with Petukh, those Russian prisoners reduced to being “common prey” so that “anyone henceforth could use him as and when they wanted”. She sees their heads plunged deep in the excrement of their fellow prisoners, polluted by shared waste.

Like the linguist in Paul Bowles’ 1945 story A Distant Episode – brutalised, his tongue and connection to the world he knew severed by forces beyond his control – M’s desire for innocence, if not something stronger, compels her to seek anonymity among those with whom she shares no linguistic or cultural connection. In this respect, the book recalls authors like Peter Handke writing about the “inspired namelessness” of non-verbal communication. Stepanova even references Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, which Handke helped write. I was also reminded of another German-language author, Yoko Tawada, whose characters, dislocated from linguistic or social attachments, seek freedom in chance encounters and imaginative play.

Yet imaginative escape is never entirely innocent. Without vigilance, it can become an act of looking away.

Like her masterly In Memory of Memory (2021), Stepanova asks us: if hell is built gradually, little by little, day by day, by the time anyone notices, will you be covered in blood? The beast is part of ordinary life. Yet ordinariness does not guarantee you protection. Ordinary life is always on the verge of violation. We draw apart the curtains, never knowing if a landscape or hellscape might greet us. The Disappearing Act, like its protagonist – a woman with a suitcase but nowhere to go, a phone but no one to call, belongings but no plans to stay – is itinerant, whimsical, disturbing, brutal and, yes, beautiful. It informs us that, sometimes, it is better to destroy yourself than to carry on as if everything were the same. It is better to stop believing the world you live in is the same one you once knew. Hell may be close but the void is even closer – and it’s when the flames burn brightest that we learn what it means to live.

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale, is published by Fitzcarraldo ($30).

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