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Indlæser... Disappearing Earth: A novel (original 2019; udgave 2019)af Julia Phillips (Forfatter)
Work InformationDisappearing Earth af Julia Phillips (2019)
   Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog.   ) Mcdede | Jul 19, 2023 |  This story sucks you in from the start and then kind of leaves you questioning as it cycles through a variety of perspectives and stories that can on surface seem almost unrelated. When the kidnapper appears in the book it's obvious, even though it's not directly acknowledged, but it doesn't take away from the suspense of the story as that is driven through trying to connect how all these women's stories are interwoven and connected to this crime. This book accomplishes something rarely seen in crime dramas in taking the focus away from the perpetrator to the point of irrelevance and instead focusing on how it effects those left behind and the community. It also does an excellent job of portraying this heartbreaking story without ever being dark or descriptively traumatic, allowing the reader to fill it in for themselves or avoid it if that's too much for them. Really interesting tactic of writing for this type of story and I quite enjoyed it, easily recommended. (  ) WhiteRaven.17 | Jan 16, 2023 |  ) ninagl | Jan 7, 2023 | ) emmy_of_spines | Sep 8, 2022 | The quality of the writing is so high that it merits consideration as literary fiction, as evidenced by its status as a National Book Award finalist. The book's structure is distinctive; each chapter reflects a consecutive month of the year following the girls' disappearance, seen through the lives of different characters whose interconnections emerge very gradually. It could be considered travel writing, given the descriptions of the geography and people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. In far eastern Russia, much closer to Alaska, Japan and Korea than to Moscow or St. Petersburg and accessible only by plane or boat, Kamchatka's isolation is an ongoing influence on events in the novel. Socio-political history is another key element, as Phillips describes Kamchatka's residents' responses to the passing of the Soviet era, which offered security if little else, and the challenges of life under Putin. And there is a definite feminist flavor to Phillips' compassionate treatment of the women whose stories are the heart of the book. Their lives are for the most part disappointing as they struggle to establish careers, relationships, and independence from cultural, political, and geographic constraints. The sadness of their endeavors to remain strong, to continue existing in a world of adversity and misfortune, pervades the narrative. Although it took three or four chapters to become clear, I found the ways in which the characters are interconnected to be the richest aspect of the book, the most brilliant display of Phillips' gifts as a writer. Nothing heavy-handed, sometimes only a faint reference that comes across almost like a scent on a gentle breeze. It's there, but what is it exactly? How does it fit with the other pieces? Brilliantly, as it turns out. ( ) BarbKBooks | Aug 15, 2022 |
...the mystery (which turns out to have quite a few twists; it's worth reading until the very end) isn't everything, either. As Phillips has said in interviews, her book is a means of exploring the violence in women's lives, violence in many forms: The aforementioned widowing, which occurs when a man dies in a car accident on an icy road. Domestic violence in all its abusive forms. Abduction, rape, keeping secrets. As the many characters live through the calendar year, they appear in each others' stories, bit by bit. If you're paying attention, you may figure who took the girls. There will be those eager to designate “Disappearing Earth” a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it. And if there is a single misstep in Phillips’s nearly flawless novel, it arrives with the tidy ending that seems to serve the needs of a genre rather than those of this particularly brilliant novel. But a tidy ending does not diminish Phillips’s deep examination of loss and longing, and it is a testament to the novel’s power that knowing what happened to the sisters remains very much beside the point. The ending of “Disappearing Earth” ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings. The novel’s title comes from a scary story that Alyona tells her sister in the very first chapter, about a village on a bluff overlooking the ocean which is suddenly washed away by a tsunami. This story will be retold by the novel’s close, just as the novel will retell itself. 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. For the heirs of all that wreckage, discovering that they have the ability to achieve this unity—that they have had it all along—is the one great act of detection required of them. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. Storytelling is a major thread here, with the telling of stories starting and ending the book, and appearing throughout. Disappearing Earth is closer to a traditional novel than Elizabeth Strout’s Anything is Possible or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, but its use of storytelling functions in much the same way, each chapter a story unto itself, the stories layered on top of those that came before, the threads and themes accruing as the book builds. The book never utilizes a point-of-view more than once. One of the downsides of this type of novel, of course, is that in not returning to characters and their particular stories, the reader may feel dissatisfied. In later stories, we catch glimpses or hear whispers of what’s happened to earlier characters, but there is a suspension here, a feeling of loss. This structure, though, nicely speaks to the loss of the girls, and allows that sense of incompletion to underscore the possibility that there may not be an ending at all, much less one that is fulfilling. HæderspriserDistinctionsNotable Lists
"One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two sisters, eight and eleven, go missing. In the ensuing months the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. Social and ethnic tensions have long simmered in the region, and outsiders are often the first to be accused..."--Provided by publisher. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Indlæser...GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit: (3.88)
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