(In)visible

by Ivan Baidak

Overview

Diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, attends his first meeting at a social support group. Here he meets Anna, a charity worker with a face hemangioma, Marta a TV anchor with alopecia, and Eva a make up artist with vitiligo. The following week he moves in with them.

Shaped after the writer’s own experience of living with Tourette’s syndrome, Adam tries to move from self-inflicted invisibility to being visible—in his family, career, and personal life.

Invisible is a book about what it means to be different. A book that encourages acceptance and tolerance. A book about fear and escape, about the necessity of being loved and accepted. It’s about the permanent struggle with your complexes and attempts to start loving yourself. It’s about hard stories. But also about big hearts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771838535
Publisher:	Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/15/2022
Series:	World Prose , #71
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

?van Baidak is a daring Ukrainian fiction writer and poet whose debut novel Personally Me Personally for You (2013) became a national bestseller and garnered excellent critical reviews. His two short story collections, Role Plays (2014) and The Shadows of Our Dates (2017), topped bookstore bestseller lists. His most recent novel Invisible (2020) was recognized by PEN Ukraine as one of the best novels of 2020, and was the subject of a play and several photo exhibitions. Ivan Baidak's short stories have been translated into English, German, Serbian, Polish, Spanish, and Italian, and presented at European literary festivals. He received a scholarship from Gaude Polonia 2020. He is from Lviv, Ukraine.

Read an Excerpt

“Stop this at once!” father yelled at me, but I just couldn’t stop my tics. “Can’t you hear?” “Enough!” mom stepped in. “He’s not able to control it, and you know it very well.” Father stopped yelling. He muttered: “Then he’ll have to learn to control it.” This emotionally jarring episode happened to Adam, the main protagonist of (In)Visible, a Ukrainian novel by Ivan Baidak. Diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome as a teenager, Adam, now a 26-year-old freelance designer, looks back at his rollercoaster relationship with an abusive father and guides the reader through his more recent experiences.

He attends his first meeting of a therapy group for people with disfiguring disorders and meets Eva, Marta, and Anna. Shaped after the writer’s own experience of living with Tourette’s syndrome, Adam tries to move from self-inflicted invisibility to being visible—in his family, career, and personal life. His straightforward conversations with Eva, a makeup artist, Anna, a charity worker, and Marta, a TV anchor, pull the curtains aside to show us how these young people go about their daily lives in a society that has a long way to go in terms of tolerance and acceptance.

A tapestry woven out of four stories, the novel lets us hear the voices of millennials pushing against othering and struggling to accept—and love—their bodies as they are.

I picked this book up because I felt a strong urge to give its protagonists voices in English. Louder voices to enter a global conversation around disability and representation. Exploring a lesser-known Ukrainian context, the novel adds to the discourse of disability writers sharing their stories. David Mitchell co-translating The Reason I Jump and Alice Wong and a constellation of writers behind Disability Visibility are some of the first that spring to mind when thinking about potential ‘conversation partners.’ The novel has already inspired artists to bring the narrative out of the book and ‘translate’ it into a dance performance and a visual arts exhibition—which only speaks for its urgency.

Editorial Reviews

"My heart broke so many times reading this book, and at the level of ignorance that I knew was not fiction. I’m very grateful to Baidak for writing this novel." —Just Geeking By

"A thought-provoking narrative that exposes the fortitude and strength of will needed to embrace one’s wholeness despite the reality of an ableist society that views you as defective." —Hollay Ghadery, The Miramichi Reader

From the Publisher