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booksandbread_ 's review for:
Vladivostok Circus
by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Dusapin’s books aren’t built on plot so much as atmosphere, silence, and what slips through the cracks.
Vladivostok Circus is no different.
At first it can feel unremarkable, quiet, almost evasive, but that’s the terrain she’s asking us to enter.
Here the circus is less a spectacle than a metaphor. The Russian bar act, one body airborne, two bodies holding her steady, becomes a way of asking: what does it mean to entrust yourself to another?
To place your life, your art, or even your heart in someone else’s hands?
The novel keeps circling that question.
Nathalie, the costume designer, is tentative and unsure of herself.
Anna, the flyer, is recovering from injury.
Nino & Anton are the anchors.
Each is precarious.
Each must yield some part of themselves to the others if they’re going to create something that holds.
That fragility is the point.
We don’t get a cathartic arc.
Nathalie never transforms into someone bold and certain.
The performance doesn’t end in triumph.
Instead, what we’re given are moments, moisturizer passed hand to hand, a body of light imagined in fabric, trust tested on the bar.
Dusapin is reminding us that intimacy is often built not in declarations but in gestures, pauses, fragments of connection.
It’s a novel about how art and life both require vulnerability.
The body aches, betrays, falters, and yet it’s the only medium through which we can connect.
The atmosphere you breathe in here, the silence, the ambiguity, the unfinishedness, is itself the language.
Closing the book, I didn’t feel dazzled.
I felt suspended, as if Dusapin wanted me to live inside the tension of what’s fragile and unresolved.
That’s where Dusapins quiet power lies: teaching us to honor the fleeting and the incomplete, to see trust itself as an act of creation.
Vladivostok Circus is no different.
At first it can feel unremarkable, quiet, almost evasive, but that’s the terrain she’s asking us to enter.
Here the circus is less a spectacle than a metaphor. The Russian bar act, one body airborne, two bodies holding her steady, becomes a way of asking: what does it mean to entrust yourself to another?
To place your life, your art, or even your heart in someone else’s hands?
The novel keeps circling that question.
Nathalie, the costume designer, is tentative and unsure of herself.
Anna, the flyer, is recovering from injury.
Nino & Anton are the anchors.
Each is precarious.
Each must yield some part of themselves to the others if they’re going to create something that holds.
That fragility is the point.
We don’t get a cathartic arc.
Nathalie never transforms into someone bold and certain.
The performance doesn’t end in triumph.
Instead, what we’re given are moments, moisturizer passed hand to hand, a body of light imagined in fabric, trust tested on the bar.
Dusapin is reminding us that intimacy is often built not in declarations but in gestures, pauses, fragments of connection.
It’s a novel about how art and life both require vulnerability.
The body aches, betrays, falters, and yet it’s the only medium through which we can connect.
The atmosphere you breathe in here, the silence, the ambiguity, the unfinishedness, is itself the language.
Closing the book, I didn’t feel dazzled.
I felt suspended, as if Dusapin wanted me to live inside the tension of what’s fragile and unresolved.
That’s where Dusapins quiet power lies: teaching us to honor the fleeting and the incomplete, to see trust itself as an act of creation.