The title of this wonderful debut by American author and National Book Award finalist Julia Phillips is slightly misleading – this is neither Sci-Fi nor climate fiction. It does, however, convey a feeling of anxiousness and being on unsteady ground, and this is true for the lives of pretty much all characters in the book.
“Disappearing Earth” starts out as a Whodunit: it’s August, and Alyona and Sophia are left to wander on their own while their mother works. The two young sisters are abducted by a man who lures them into his car. In the following twelve chapters, one for each month after the girls’ disappearance, we’re introduced to a line of characters who are all directly or indirectly connected to the kidnapping – students, young mothers, ethnic Russians and reindeer-herders from remote villages, members of the Even and Koryak indigenous peoples.
Every chapter is a story of its own and together they draw an intricate picture of Kamchatkan life. The complex web of characters gets tied together more and more until, in ‘July’, one year after the girls’ disappearance, we are presented with the satisfying resolution to the mystery, those final threads tying everything together.
The Kamchatka peninsula on the Bering Strait is as remote as it gets. Also known as “the land of fire and ice”, it is home to the largest active volcano of the Northern Hemisphere ( the 4,750 metres high Klyuchevskaya Sopka), geysers, hot springs, ice caves, magnificent lakes and amazing wildlife. A nine-hour flight to the East of Moscow, Kamchatka can only be reached by air or water since there are no roads connecting it to mainland Russia. Only around 400,000 people live on the 1250-km-long peninsula, half of them in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and many more in towns nearby, leaving an unbelievably vast area of wilderness. After the Second World War, Kamchatka was declared a military zone by Soviet authorities and it remained off-limits to Soviet citizens until 1989 and to foreigners until 1990.
The nuances of Russian culture, the ethnic tensions, the racial dynamics and the colonial and Soviet ties of the Kamchatka region all come into play in “Disappearing Earth”. Julia Philipps spent 18 months in Kamchatka on a Fulbright grant and her experiences shine through in beautiful descriptions of landscapes, weather, indigenous customs and city life.
This is a novel which is also part travelogue, part cultural guide and all in all a completely enthralling story with a group of credible characters who are dealt quite a challenging hand by being thrown into a place as remote as Kamchatka – a place where cultures collide and where the gap between the heritage of Soviet times on the one hand and the natives’ struggle to keep the old ways alive on the other seems so very hard to bridge. As one life’s story after the other is told, the question of what happened to the girls loses some of its importance.
As soon as I’d finished the book, I started researching all things Kamchatka and found the strangest offers for bear-hunting trips and accommodations which all look like the Soviet times are still going strong. If salmon fishing, volcano climbing and/or skiing, big game hunting and dogsled tours are your thing and you’re looking to truly get away from it all, this is the place to be and you can take off into the wilderness by either jeep or helicopter.
The Kamchatka climate is comparable to that of Alaska, which is not too far away – just on the other side of the Bering Strait and – fun fact – Alaska was bought by the US from Russia in 1867 for just 7.2 million dollars, and, of course, without consulting the indigenous population.
And: should you want to read another fascinating story set in a cold, remote place of great natural beauty, here’s one which takes place on ‘America’s Last Frontier’: Kristin Hannah’s “The Great Alone”, a # 1 New York Times bestselling family drama in which the role played by Alaska’s scenery and wilderness is just as important as that of the main characters. This novel about a family in crisis and their fight for survival will have you treasuring all our mod cons and turning the heating up just ever so slightly. Even though the days are getting shorter, we’ll still be getting a lot more light than Kamchatkans and Alaskans, that’s for sure. The perfect time for literary travels.
(Should you want to read it in German, this is another prime example for a cover and title not doing justice to the original: “Liebe und Verderben” (“love and doom”). Really? That’s the best they could come up with? Don’t let it put you off…)
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