Disappearing Earth

“Alyona looked across the street at the bus stop. A bus would take them more than half an hour, while in a car they’d be home in ten minutes.”

This passage marks a pivotal moment in the book: when Alyona chooses to get in the car with the kidnapper, thereby setting the primary mystery in motion.

“During gym this afternoon, they had jogged together like always. Olya made sure their feet matched. She could have run faster, but love meant making compromises. With people that mattered, Olya did not want to be free.”

This quote describes Olya’s intense love for her friend, Diana. Fearful in the wake of the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters, Diana’s mother, Valentina, sought to separate her daughter from Olya, whose family she felt was a bad influence. Olya’s relatively minor tragedy, set in motion by the bigger tragedy of the kidnapping, brings into focus the rippling effects one event can have on young members of a community.

“‘Weren’t the natives always here?’ […] ‘They used to stay in the villages where they belong.’”

Olya poses the question in reference to the indigenous ethnic minorities of Kamchatka. The response comes from Valentina, who blindly dismisses this reality. The passage captures the nostalgia that runs through much of the book. Valentina is longing for a bygone era when the old regime provided meaning and order, and when everyone stayed in their place.

“In the sunset, the pebbles on the shore shifted their color from black and gray to honey. Amber. They were brightening. Soon the stones would glow, and the water in the bay was going to turn pink and orange. Spectacular in the city center, where people feared to have their pretty daughters go.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of Phillips’s writing is her ability to convey a sense of place. Her description of the variegated colors of Kamchatka at dusk exemplifies this skill. Her evocative treatment of place often resonates with her descriptions of characters. In this case, she draws a parallel between the beauty of the area and the beauty of the young girls who inhabit it.

“Max activated a new sense in her. Just as the ability to hear lived in her ears, taste in her tongue, touch in her fingertips, a particular sensitivity to Max now concentrated in her belly button.”

This quote centers on Katya’s intense physical attraction to the beautiful, but simple, Max. Her desire for him distracts her from the anxieties of life, including the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters.

“The blister didn’t hurt, but the look of the thing, a bodily purple when exposed, unsettled her. During the first week or two she wore the bandage, a few people asked what happened, but once a month passed, nobody noticed it anymore. That fabric strip became her affectation–like wearing a silly hat or whistling.”

This passage exemplifies how quickly Phillips’s characters normalize the abnormal. Valentina only becomes alarmed when she realizes she has been wearing the bandage for almost a year. When she finally sees a doctor, he tells her the blister is in fact a serious medical condition that requires immediate treatment.

“Under her feet, the passage’s floor was gritty. The number of dirty bodies that must have gone this way before. Was this how everyone else she knew had entered surgery—naked, frozen?”

Phillips exposes characters’ mental states through physical descriptions of the setting. In this passage, she conveys Valentina’s vulnerability and discomfort before a sudden and unexpected surgery.

“‘Something happens in the north,’ he said, ‘and no one pays any attention. Then the same thing goes on down here and it’s news.’”

This quote gets to the crux of the book’s conflict. Not all disappearances receive equal amounts of media attention. The media does not report on Lilia, a missing indigenous girl, whereas the disappearance of the two ethnically Russian girls receives broad media coverage. Unequal treatment in criminal matters occurs around the world, including North America and Europe, and reflects local power structures, as well as racial, ethnic, gender, and class biases.

“The sameness of each day, each year, acted like the endless reopening of a cut, scarring those summers into her memory.”

Ksyusha, an Even woman, reminisces about the stability of her life in her hometown of Esso after leaving to attend university in Petropavlovsk. The quote not only conveys a sense of loss and nostalgia, it also alludes to the violence that touches the various characters’ lives through the use of the words “cut” and “scarring.”

“The song changed to something faster. The man beside Lada poured her another drink. ‘No, I don’t need it,’ she said. ‘It’s alright,’ he said, sliding the glass her way.”

A man plying a young woman with alcohol raises red flags, but the circumstances, a New Year’s celebration, mitigates the effect. Only at the end of the novel does the reader learn how close Lada came to danger. Her sexual prospect that evening was none other than Yegor, the man who kidnapped Lilia and the Golosovskaya sisters.

“Natasha sent him back a selfie with her middle finger raised. Then she followed that almost instantly with a picture of herself lit by the lamp on their bedside table, her top lowered, her lips and cheeks spun by the low wattage into dark gold. The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.”

Philips introduces the reader to many characters, each one distinct, unique, and multilayered. This passage reveals Natasha’s complexity as a playful, yet sexual woman, while also providing a glimpse into her relationship with her husband, Yuri, who works at sea.

“Everyone looked better at a distance. Everyone sounded sweetest when you did not have to hear them talk too long.”

This quote raises the issue of shifting perception as it relates to proximity and distance. Natasha’s husband, Yuri, has worked at sea for 12 years. He is bored and bothersome when he is home. The couple’s relationship is at its best when they are apart.

“The communities Revmira grew up in had splintered, making them easy places to be forgotten, easy places to disappear.”

Revmira longs for a bygone era of enforced isolation. Kamchatka’s proximity to the United States has made it valuable geopolitically, bringing profound changes to the region. The fractured present contrasts sharply with Revmira’s past, which consisted of a stable home, principled people, and a strong Even culture. Phillips highlights the disappearing way of life of the Even people throughout the book.

“The world was built for people to suffer.”

This quote relates to the death of Remvira’s husband, Artyom. Phillips weaves different types of suffering through the novel. Indeed, she presents suffering as an intrinsic aspect of the characters and their worldview. This suffering entwines with another particularly Russian outlook that presents characters as subject to fate.

“Boots, buckles, papers, and scarves. After Gleb’s accident, she thought she would die. She thought she had. This date took him and pulled her down after, grief determined gravity. But now she would live. She had to. It was what she did: live while others could not. There was no pleasure in it.”

After learning of the death of her husband, Artyom, Revmira reminisces about her first husband, Gleb, who died years earlier in a car accident. She gathers Artyom’s belongings before pulling Gleb’s suitcase out of the closet and going through his things. Things are all that remain of the two men she loved. Revmira pieced her life back together after Gleb’s death, thanks in large part to Artyom. With the person who saved her gone, she finds herself alone with her suffering.

“Once in her life, one time, she would like someone to love her completely, with no room left for anything else.”

Nadia experienced heartbreak at a young age when her boyfriend, Slava, left her while she was pregnant. She meets him at a cafe five years later and feels pained to learn that he got married. The hurt is still there, despite the passage of time, her relationship with Chegga, her move to Esso, and her job at a bank.

“She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She craved things darker, stranger, out of bounds.”

Zoya is a married woman with a young child, yet she has vivid sexual fantasies about the migrant workers outside her balcony. She yearns to escape her mundane reality by diving into an unfamiliar world of danger and sexual gratification. The quote reinforces the dual themes of isolation and confinement that run throughout the novel.

“You lock up your mind and guard your reactions so nobody, not an interrogator or a parent or a friend, will break in. You earn a graduate degree and a good position. You keep your savings in foreign currency and you pay your bills on time. When your colleagues ask you about your home life, you don’t answer. You work harder. You exercise. Your clothing flatters. You keep the edge of your affection sharp, a knife, so that those near you know to handle it carefully.”

This passage relates to Oksana, a scientist and the sole witness to the kidnapping of Alyona and Sophia. Oksana implies that successfully joining a professional class is not enough to outweigh the mistrust she faces simply because she is a woman. The police doubt her account of the kidnapping, preferring instead to label the incident an accidental drowning. The authorities and others in the community are skeptical because Oksana is a woman and thus inherently untrustworthy.

“It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No you want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.”

Oksana grapples with guilt after Max leaves her apartment doors open and allows her dog, Malysh, to escape. Her feelings of having failed her pet are inextricably entwined with the deep-seeded guilt she feels for having failed to stop the kidnapping of the Golosovskaya sisters. The passage addresses Oksana’s struggle with the lack of control she exercises over meaningful events in her life.

“She started having these attacks last August, after her daughters disappeared. A doctor gave her tablets to relieve the anxiety. Those did not help. No prescription brought her children home.”

Nearly a year after her daughters’ disappearance, Marina still struggles with debilitating and near-constant panic attacks. Medication provides no relief. Instead, Marina copes with her loss by distracting herself with random facts about her environment and by pressing her palm against her chest. The passage of time has not healed Marina’s wounds.

“What answers could Alla Innokentevna have for her? Marina might ask what it was like to see your child turn thirteen, or fifteen, or graduate from high school. How it felt to know, and not just suspect, that if you had been a better parent, more attentive, more responsible, then your baby would not be gone today. How to go on.”

Both Alla and Marina lost their daughters, but their experiences with the authorities could not be more different. The search for Lilia was cursory, with police labeling the indigenous girl a runaway. By contrast, they investigated the disappearance of the Golosovskaya sisters more rigorously. Alla wants to know how Marina kept the police interested. She offers to answer any questions Marina might have in return. Like Marina, Alla feels guilty about her daughter’s disappearance and blames herself for the abduction.

“Some nights she dreamed of her daughters and woke up sobbing, and the pain then was as fresh and sharp and new as it had been in the sixth hour after they went missing, as horrendous as a knife stuck in her womb.”

The violent imagery in this passage not only conveys Marina’s raw emotions about her missing daughters, it also echoes the violent acts the women of Kamchatka experience in their daily lives. The quote stresses the particular pain mothers experience (daughters, womb), and the persistence of that pain.

“Sophia, look at me. What do you want to hear to go back to sleep? How about the story of the villagers, after they wash out to sea?”

This passage brings the novel full circle. In Chapter 1, Alyona tells Sophia a story about a tsunami washing away a village on the edge of a cliff. Alyona repeats this story in the final chapter, telling her younger sibling that the villagers survived out in the ocean swimming freely amid whales and other happy sea creatures. No-one helps the villagers, but they help each, just as the two sisters support each other during their time in captivity.