The New Novel
Barbara Quick’s fourth novel, What Disappears—a multi-generational story of love and loss, set in Tsarist Russia, Belle Époque Paris, and the world of the Ballets Russes—was published by Regal House on May 17, 2022.
Photo courtesy of Judith Lindbergh
Praise for What Disappears
“In What Disappears, Barbara Quick spreads before the reader a banquet of secrets, jealousy, betrayal, genius, high fashion, loss, tragedy and poignant regrets peppered with fascinating historical details and cameo appearances by some of the most famous ballerinas, writers, and artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A cinematic novel, which cuts between Russia and Paris, past and future, fear and desire, What Disappears has a rich plot filled with enough reversals, revelations, and unexpected twists to keep readers turning its pages long into the night.”
–Mary Mackey, New York Times bestselling author of A Grand Passion
“Gorgeously written and daring in scope of drama from the poverty and pogroms of Russia to the fraught, exquisite world of divine fashion and the Ballets Russes of Paris 1909, What Disappears follows the poignant story of identical twins separated at nine months in a world that is changing rapidly. One sister clings to her difficult life as a dancer; the other who has lost both her great loves, struggles on with her three daughters. Between breathtaking scenes of betrayal, danger and perfect love found and lost, little is as we expect it as the twins reunite in Paris. One sister is the quiet steadfast heart of this story and the other its restless discontent. Some dreams shatter, and other come true in a way you never could have expected. What Disappears is a book you will find hard to put down and impossible to forget.”
–Stephanie Cowell, author of Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet and Marrying Mozart, American Book Award recipient
“What Disappears is a tour de force. With a dancer’s grace, agility and subtlety, Barbara Quick creates indelible scenes that unfold as her characters, both famous and fictional, discover the fragility of their deepest core values. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to keep up with my own racing mind! How do we use the artistic self to cover or costume or hide? In this author’s hands, twin-hood becomes a metaphor for the conflict between a stage persona and an offstage one. I shivered with recognition at her portrayal of the male ego, presumption, oblivion and rational thought being clouded by carnal or artistic desires. Any dancer or athlete will resonate with these characters’ use of physical work to staunch or avoid the excruciating reality of emotional pain. The historic figures in the book— Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, and titans of the fashion world— become ever more real through the way Quick illustrates the turmoil and self-doubt of the artistic mind, regardless of the artist’s fame. Quick reveals symbolism threaded through these characters’ lives that sheds light on our own in the way only great literature can do. Are we all performing our way through life, “running from whatever demons we carry around inside us… straight into the arms of death”? By the end of this masterful work, we can indeed understand that when our inner and outer selves reconcile, what disappears is in fact what remains.”
–Gavin Larsen, author of Being a Ballerina: The Power and Perfection of a Dancing Life
“Barbara Quick is at the height of her powers in her newest novel, an epic narrative of the ballet world, European history and high fashion. Her characters are so real—so vital—they seem to say, “Come toward us and see what’s inside!” And we do, following them with fascination one by one. The plot crosses back and forth across continents and time to braid an intergenerational story with unflagging momentum and gripping emotional appeal. Like her 2007 novel Vivaldi’s Virgins, What Disappears sings with musical complexity and vivid sensuality.”
–Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate
What Disappears is available from your favorite independent bookstore as a quality paperback; from that other place we won’t mention; or in a special hard-cover collector’s edition on the Regal House website.
Here’s how this novel, 40 years in the making, came to be written…
I spent the first seventeen years of my life trying to find ways to escape the violence and dysfunction that made my childhood feel more like a prison than any sort of paradise. Of course, there were also moments of sweetness, especially after my sister was born, giving me a sense of purpose in trying to give her the kind of love and nurturing I’d always wanted for myself. I started writing poetry at the age of nine, around the time my sister was born, discovering the beauty and relief that have ever since been the unwavering gift to me of words.
I was a year ahead in school, and left for college as soon as I could—which, in retrospect I realize was very hard on my little sister. Right before graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) as an English major, with a minor in French—working as an undergraduate teaching assistant and devoted intensely to studying the novel—I took a year off to see if I had it in me to write fiction. I balked at the idea of going to graduate school, wanting to find myself, as I said then, “on the other side of the typewriter.”
Happenstance and good luck got me the use of a small stone cottage in rural West County Cork, Ireland. I lived on next to nothing there, in all the months but summer, with fingers that were sometimes blue from the cold. I wrote some tales set in the nearby village of Ardfield, which was largely unchanged from how it had been in the nineteenth century. I also began pulling together the strands of a longer story concocted from the small but tantalizing trove of details my maternal grandmother and great-uncle had given me about growing up as Russian Jews in a family of dressmakers in Kishinev, under the last Tsar. The resulting manuscript became what I like to call my pre-first novel. It had enough good in it to earn some words of encouragement from the fiction editors at the New Yorker.
An unsolved mystery at the heart of that novel I started writing in Ireland some forty-four years ago—along with the disappearance from my life of my own beloved sister—evolved into the plot for what will be my fourth published novel, What Disappears, coming out from Regal House Publishing. It’s a story that begins in Tsarist Russia, with the birth of identical twins, and ends in the Belle Époque world of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In writing and reimagining this tale over the years, I found a way to explain why someone like my great-grandmother, a humble provincial tailor who made hats and coats for the girls’ parochial school in Kishinev, took the train twice a year, all by herself, to Paris. My grandmother, shrugging, said it was to see the fashions. But the emotional truth of this extravagance required a much deeper explanation. What but the search for one’s own lost sister would compel such risky and even obsessive behavior?
It’s been a great joy to see this novel so beautifully launched into the world by Regal House Publishing!