One is never sure where Disappearing Earth is heading, if anywhere at all. Here, as elsewhere, Phillips’s understated writing and tangential approach to plot is such that this less-than-random distribution of characters seems natural and unremarkable until all of a sudden one realizes-quite a long way in-that was the point all along. Except for the odd mention of reindeer herding, yurts and traditional dances, they are however hardly distinguishable from the Russian characters ethnicity aside, of course, they are Russian. Second, a good portion of the characters are Even or Koryak, Siberian tribal people who are referred to, with greater or lesser amounts of dismissiveness, as “natives”.
Men appear, of course, but none of the stories is told from a male character’s point of view. The first is that the protagonists of the various stories are all women. The stories have a couple of characteristics in common, both of which-perhaps because of the fragmentation created by the multiple story structure-creep up on the reader unawares. The structure renders her two-page character list at the beginning of the book unnecessary: it is easy enough to work out who is who as people drop in and out of each other’s stories. This is not just cleverness-and it is indeed very clever-for it allows Phillips to introduce a varied cast of characters of Tolstoyan dimensions. There is no central narrative: the pieces come together through tangential connections.
Most notable, perhaps, is that Phillips has constructed her novel as a series of connected short stories, each one of which could easily stand on its own. This might have been a foible or affectation-Phillips spent time in Kamchatka as a Fulbright fellow-but Disappearing Earth is nothing if not deft. A story that might have been set anywhere, but Julia Phillips sets hers in Kamchatka, one of the remoter parts of Russia’s remote Far East.
Two young girls are snatched off a city street the crime ripples through the wider community.
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