A CONVERSATION WITH IDRA NOVEY, AUTHOR OF WAYS TO DISAPPEAR.

What is Ways to Disappear about?

It’s about a Brazilian writer who’s wracked up some serious gambling debt and disappears. In her absence, her unhinged loan shark goes after her American translator, her two children, and the wealthy editor who launched her career. Beneath that though it’s about desire and the conflicting ways people long to be understood.

Why did you set your novel in Brazil?

I lived at one point in Salvador da Bahia, in the north of Brazil, and it was one of the happiest, most fascinating periods in my life. I never felt so free and off-script as I did in Bahia. I loved how people on the sidewalk would stop and dance if someone pulled out a drum and how the Brazilian writers I was reading had a similar spontaneity in the way they put together their sentences. Living in Bahia was what led me to become a literary translator. This novel was a way to return to that liberating time and write about my now decade-long addiction to translating Brazilian literature.

Would you consider your book a literary thriller about Brazil? A romance? What would you call it?

I’d call it a mystery with some manifestos tucked in. Or a thriller with some theories about translation. I couldn’t find any novels with a literary translator in it as adventurous and generous in spirit as the best translators I know so I turned off my wifi and wrote the novel I wanted to read.

Did your background as a poet and translator influence your approach to this novel, or direct the story in any way?

I had a strong sense of the arc of the novel before I wrote it but I followed my instincts as a poet as I moved through the scenes, letting the cadence of a phrase lead to an image or question I hadn’t expected. And the book initially began with my fascination as a translator with the Portuguese phrase “vou embora.” It basically means “I’m out of here” and you can say it without adding any information about where you’re going or when you’ll be back. We don’t have a daily phrase in English that’s as vague and accepted as going “embora” in Brazil. Beatriz, the writer who disappears into a tree in the novel goes completely, arboreally “embora.”

The characters in your novel live in a Brazil that is different from the glossy travel brochures of Rio de Janeiro– with kidnappers, loan sharks and some genuinely scary people. How did you come to write about Brazil’s darker side?

Homicides and kidnappings dominate the news cycle every night in Brazil. I can’t remember a trip to Rio when I didn’t hear gunfire in the distance at some point. But alongside the endemic violence and the devastating poverty that produces it, there are writers publishing phenomenal books and musicians producing phenomenal music and some of the art coming out of Brazil now is extraordinary. With the Olympics in Brazil this year maybe we’ll get to hear more about what’s happening culturally in Rio and São Paolo.

Did the story change directions as you wrote the novel? Did anything surprise you as you went along?

When I started the book, I identified most with Emma as a translator and with Raquel as a daughter who finds her mother a little baffling. In later drafts, after having my first child and then a second one, I began to identify more with Raquel’s mother, Beatriz. The character I’d invented for her—a mother who sits on the couch writing surreal, disturbing stories after her children go to sleep— was no longer just a person in the novel. It was me on my living room sofa at nine pm.

Where did you get the idea to send Beatriz up a tree on the opening page?

One afternoon I had to be at two places at once and it occurred to me as something I would really like to do myself—to just pack a bag and a book and perch there on a branch for a while, to allow myself to be that uninhibited and inexplicable, and maybe once I was situated, indulge in a few puffs on a fat cigar.

The story is broken into with gossip news, radio bulletins and emails. Why not just tell the story straight up?

For four years, I told almost no one about this book until I’d finished writing it. I worked on it at night or in the dawn hours before my children woke. The entrance of those unexpected voices in the story felt in sync with the kaleidoscope nature of the narrative and also with the kaleidoscope quality of my life as a poet, translator, professor, mother, wife, sister, and person on the subway who is so sleepy she just stares at the dirty window, making up the plot of a novel.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently co-translating a brilliant Iranian poet named Garous Abdolmalekian with Ahmad Nadalizadeh. Garous is immensely popular in Iran and writes the most startling images. In one poem, an army tank rolls over his bed sheets into his dreams. I’m also working on some poems of my own and in fits and starts, what I hope may someday evolve into another novel.