Disappearing Earth

To those of us who only know Kamchatka as a territory in the board game of Risk, Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips, will come as something of a revelation. Kamchatka is a peninsula on the extreme Eastern edge of Russia, across the ocean from Alaska. Phillips spent a lot of time researching the book, and based on what she has written, it seems like a depressing place.

The novel is really a set of intersecting short stories, all told from the perspective of a woman or girl, and most of these females are longing to leave the place they are at. The incident that is the epicenter of the stories is the kidnapping of two little girls, which happens in the first chapter. They are induced into getting into a stranger's car, and for the rest of the book (each chapter is a different month) the residents of the peninsula wonder what happened to them.

The geography of the place is a major factor in Phillips' book, as it relates to where the girls could have gone: "And air and sea were the sole options for leaving. Though Kamchatka was no longer a closed territory by law, the region was cut off from the rest of the world by geography. To the south, east, and west was only ocean. To the north, walling off the Russian mainland, were hundreds of kilometers of mountains and tundra. Impassable. Roads within Kamchatka were few and broken: some, to the lower and central villages, were made of dirt, washed out for most of the year; others, to the upper villages, only existed in winter, when they were pounded out of ice. No roads connected the peninsula to the rest of the continent. No one could come or go over land." As the book goes on, the police slow down their search, and people assume the girls have either drowned or otherwise dead.

Each chapter mentions the girls, but some of them are quite far afield. One deals with a young woman and her boyfriend as they go camping, and are harassed by a bear. Another is a girl who is told by her best friend's mother not to bother calling her daughter anymore, because she disapproves of her single mother. This same woman, in something of a writer's payback, is rushed to the hospital after a long-festering blister on her chest is looked at by a doctor.

Kamchatka, like Alaska, has many native inhabitants, that is who are not Russian, and they are featured in many stories. One of the best stories in the book is about a young native girl in college who is asked to join a native dance troupe. She can't really dance, but joins anyway. She has a Russian boyfriend back home who is a bit of a control freak, and she enters into an affair with one of the native boys in her troupe.

A bit into the book we are introduced to a family who also has a missing child, although that girl was eighteen when she disappeared, and is thought to have run away. Her sister, with kids of her own, has always thought she wouldn't have left without a word, and her brother is on the autism spectrum, obsessed with UFO stories.

All of these characters are linked to each other, and just when you think Phillips will never get around to letting us know what happened to the girls, the penultimate chapter comes along, and I read it at a fevered pace. Up until then I was wondering what the entire purpose of the book was--it seemed to be several stories about women wanting to get away from their dreary existence, but were stuck on this peninsula.

I certainly don't want to go to Kamchatka, especially after reading this, but I found it interesting nonetheless. The prose is intricate and frequently beautiful, if also sad.