![]() ![]() She describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity. It’s a well-worn cliché of book jacket copy to say that place is as important a character as any of the people in a book, and yet the women who populate Phillips’s novel are so intrinsically and intelligently identified with their region that it’s impossible to understand or even consider them without Phillips’s precise evocation of Kamchatka. What appears to be a collection of fragments, the remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost empire, is in truth capable of unity. ![]() This story will be retold by the novel’s close, just as the novel will retell itself. ![]() The ending ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings. It is the web itself that provides the solution. The official investigators in Disappearing Earth dither at the story’s periphery and come up empty-handed. But for Phillips the intricate web linking her characters is not a mystery to be uncovered by a solitary detective. ![]() all that shared personal history becomes a breeding ground for intrigue. Petropavlovsk uncannily resembles a small, overlooked city in the American West, with its old-timers praising the way things used to be, its restless youth dreaming of metropolitan glamour and escape. As remote as this world is, readers will find it strangely familiar. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |