Disappearing Earth Paperback – April 7, 2020

I am so grateful to the fabulous writers--Susan Choi, Nelle Freudenberger, Jen Beagin, Ocean Vuong, Alex George and Helen Fremont-- who have given me pleasure and new places and a more empathetic perspective this year. I have written and or will write about all of them I expect, but I have recently finished a very special novel called "Disappearing Earth" that moved me deeply with its humanity. The ending is stunning and so moving. The author is Julia Phillips. People on the jacket call it a literary thriller. But it's so much more. It's a world, dangerous but often filled with love.It takes place in Kamkatka, a peninsula off Russia that is both familiar and exotic. There are adolescents glued to cell phones in the city and, further North, reindeer herders, folk dancers and blood soup. New and old clash. Beneath the lovely surfaces--water, snow, and sun--there are jagged truths. The order of the old Soviet Union haunts. Old prejudices create alienation and misunderstandings. Phillips gives us this place with the care and detail of a scholar or expert seasoned journalist though she's a fiction writer with an elegantly honed style that is immensely readable but filled with flashes of beauty and understanding expressed in fresh, unique and often poetic images. You sit back and think, "I've never heard anything quite like that sentence before." That's rare, you know?The book begins with the disappearance of two young girls. The crime, a rarity still in this part of the world, seems to bring modern realities to the island and waves of emotion reverberate through the city. Phillips doesn't concentrate on the police investigation. She focuses on women in the city who are in one way or another affected by the crime. None are types. All feel like original territory. Like the girls they are all a bit disappeared, their complexities somewhat unseen by the world. Each character is worth a book of her own, but we get only glimpses of each as their lives become interwoven. That seems right as the men and people in their lives only seem to take in glimpses of their hopes and loneliness as they attempt to become visible and themselves. This isn't the greatest description but a lot of feelings this book engenders are inchoate and difficult to express.I so recommend this book. It's unique and gripping. It also seems to draw on this moment where the lives of women are complicated, full of unappreciated risks and hovering too close to violent threats. Phillips is SO, SO good. Buy this book. It's both a break from and a salve for our current reality.

This book provides a fascinating look at a variety of cultures on the far west-Russian peninsula of Kamchatka: middle class white Russians in the city, indigenous people living in small towns, on native lands, and in the city, and life under Soviet rule as recalled nostalgically by various older adults. Each chapter is about one individual with no immediately apparent relation to the person featured in the preceding chapters. Some of the chapters are less interesting and you are happy to see them end, while some are so engaging you are frustrated when they end. You expect that for those chapters that ended in the midst of some interesting development, the book will return to that narrative later on but it doesn’t; hence the unsatisfying description in the title of my review. And even the very end of the book is somewhat ambiguous. So while there are many hours of fascinating reading to be had here, there is also an unsatisfying lack of resolution to nearly all if the story lines.

I ordered the Kindle version of this book based on a review in the New York Times. I generally enjoy reading novels set in places I know little about and Kamchatka did not disappoint. Because I was reading the Kindle edition on my cell phone, it was easy to turn to the Internet to watch native dances of the region and walk along the streets of the cities and towns author Julia Phillips describes with passionate accuracy and deep understanding. The opening of the abduction of the two little girls is absolutely gripping, but the story began to lag as the author explored the lives of individual women and couples who were for the most part only tangentially related to the missing girls. I enjoyed these smaller stories as well-written peeks into the varying lives of people who lived on the Kamchatka peninsula, but even with the author's list of characters in the front of the book, I felt she had lost the tenuous thread of her story. Most characters had given names and nicknames which were used interchangeably and added to my confusion as a reader. The ending felt rushed and only involved a small number of the characters I had tried so diligently to keep straight in my mind. Plus, their backstories were lost by the time I reached the end of the book. Phillips is a wonderful writer who captures the look, feel, sounds, and smells of the places and people she describes, but I was tempted to jump ahead to the ending to discover if the missing girls are ever found. I'm sorry I didn't do that.

I loved the storytelling of the novel. The multiple views on the plot by different people adds depth to the story (a very sad story, at some point you see the search for the lost girls as desperate).Personally, I also appreciated the regional setting of the novel. Kamchatka is such an amazing place, and makes a perfect background for the human drama.

So pleased I came across this very atmospheric novel. I managed to lose myself in the characters and couldn't wait to get home to read it each night. It's slow which I like, and takes time to build the characters. At first I found the names of these characters from a remote part of Russia difficult to remember and had to keep referring to the helpful chart the author had provided at the start. But stick with that bit and it rewards.

O arquivo veio com defeito. Não consegui baixar no meu Kindle.

I liked the way the story switched from character to character, moving events forward to resolve the original plot line - the disappearance of two young girls. The ineptness of the police search, etc makes me think of the long ignored inattention to the resolution of the disappearance/murder, etc of indigenous women in Canada.

The seemingly coincidental chain of stories leads the reader to an unexpected climax of emotions. Every story draws me deeper into Kamchatka’s reality. It’s impossible to stop reading. And the end ... ... is an acceptable end.