On the peninsula, I was so chuzhaya it hurt." These two words mark the separation of existence into familiar and foreign. "Svoi covers your family, your home, your country, the things you know, the people you trust. "There's a good pair of Russian words, svoi and chuzhoi, meaning 'one's own' and 'other,'" Phillips said. It was, she said, "a dream come true" - but it was also an experience flush with challenges.
She was awarded a Fulbright student research grant for creative writing to Russia when she arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky - roughly 4,600 miles from her hometown - in 2011, it was the first time she had set foot in the region. "This is the place I want to go." "And when I learned about Kamchatka, I thought: This is it." "And when I learned about Kamchatka, I thought: This is it," she said. Phillips' novel has the plot of a thriller, but it's driven forward by lyrical language that readers may well miss if they rush through it to discover the age-old question of what happens at the end. When one of the characters has a panic attack, it manifests as internal and external senses of time moving at different paces: "She's moving slowly and the world is moving fast, and things are happening, and she's in profound shock." A thriller that drives itself forward through equal parts narrative and character development "To me, shock or rampant anxiety is one of the most interesting things to write about," she explained when I asked about writing in the language of shock. Information comes through in spurts time feels disconnected. As the characters work their way through longing and grief, there's the recurring sense that what they're really doing is wading through the recognition that their worlds do not look the way they wanted them to.
It is the wording of these women's stories that struck me as so similar to the anecdote from Phillips' childhood. However, the narrative soon spirals inwards until readers find themselves rethinking the characters they thought they knew. What unfolds from there feels, at first, like a collection of isolated storylines about unrelated strangers. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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