Vladivostok Circus

(by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

This probably would have been a better winter read than a summer one, but the fact that it transported me to chilly Russian landscapes in the middle of July in New York City is a testament to how atmospheric this short novel is. Like Winter in Sokcho, Vladivostok Circus is concerned with the liminal: its narrator, Nathalie, has graduated from college but hasn’t yet started the full-time job she has lined up; she’s in Vladivostok, a city on the sea, on the edge of Russia, between Europe and Asia, where her short-term job is to design costumes for a troupe of acrobats—in an in-between time after the circus closes down for the season and before the acrobats are due to travel to Ulan Ude for a big circus festival. The acrobats (bases Nino and Anton, and flyer Anna) are working on a Russian bar act, and the tension between flight and falling (and weightlessness and gravity) is ever-present: in the way the apparatus works, in the ideas Nathalie and the act’s director, Leon, have for the choreography and costumes, and in everyone’s knowledge of the risks involved. Nathalie talks about her father, a scientist who is “experimenting with the properties of air and trying to find a way to get things to fly without using any kind of fuel” and then later, Leon says this: “Imagine the act is happening in space. Weightless. A single jump would be enough to propel Anna toward infinity.”

(If you don’t know what Russian bar looks like, I would recommend watching some videos on YouTube, like this one from Barcode Circus Company—though the novel does a good job of explaining how it works and what it looks like.)

I like the descriptions in this book a lot, from the hotel Nathalie stays at early in the book (“A Soviet-era building, corridors that go on for ever, enormous rooms, salmon-colored walls adorned with still-life prints.”) to the view, near the end of the book, from the train to Ulan Ude, which “stops at stations where all the signs are covered in ice” and passes through a landscape of “disused factories, cranes swaying precariously. Water towers for ghost cities. Aircraft marooned on the steppe as if waiting for fuel.” I am so here for sentences like this: “The wind has dragged a wall of clouds over the ocean. A container ship sways lazily, a single point of color in a gray tableau.” And I like the descriptions of Anna in the circus act, and how rapt Nathalie is, watching, like this: “Each time she takes flight I lean in as she rises through the air and hangs, suspended for an instant, before falling back down and bounding up again, higher and higher every time.”