“It was at the edge of the cliff where the ocean meets the bay.” Zavoyko was kilometers past all that, making it the last district of their city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the last bit of land before sea. A mirrored high-rise, pink and yellow, with a banner advertising business space for rent. Five-story Soviet apartment buildings covered in patchwork concrete. If they had kept walking along the shoreline today, they would have seen the stony side of the hill eventually lower, exposing the stacked squares of a neighborhood overhead. “Past Zavoyko.” They sat under the peak of St. To the girls’ right was the city center, from where they had walked this afternoon to the left, marking the mouth of the bay, were those black hulks. Her chin lifted and her mouth pinched shut in concentration.Īlyona pointed down the shore at the most distant cliffs. “No.” For someone who never obeyed, Sophia could be very attentive.
“Do you know about the town that washed away?” They had to be home in time for dinner, but it wasn’t even four o’clock. “Want me to tell you a story?” Alyona asked.Īlyona checked her phone. The breeze had left Sophia’s body as cool as the ground.
“Come here,” she said, and Sophia stepped out of the bay, picked her way over, and squirmed next to Alyona. The rock was hard on her shoulders, cold on her head. From “Disappearing Earth”Īlyona lay back.
This is apparent in various details throughout the book - from her descriptions of prefab Soviet-era apartment buildings to traditional Russian cottages, called “izbas.” Read more about those observations in her annotations below. Phillips spent a year in Kamchatka doing research before she wrote the book, steeping herself in the region’s culture and history. “That’s our chunk of disappearing earth.” Author Julia Phillips wanted to convey this “sense of fear and instability,” so she opens with a story about the 1952 Kamchatka tsunami caused by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of a Russian peninsula.Īlyona’s exaggerated recounting of the tsunami is a way of entertaining her little sister Sophia, but as Phillips noted to the PBS NewsHour, it also inspired the title of the story: “The whole book rests on this story one sister tells another about a town that vanished, swept away by a giant wave,” Phillips wrote. Learn more about the book club here.Įven before sisters Alyona and Sophia Golosovsky go missing in the novel “Disappearing Earth,” it’s not hard to pick up on the fact they are in danger.
Our April 2020 pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club is Julia Phillips’ “Disappearing Earth.” Become a member of the Now Read This book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.
0 kommentar(er)
