![]() Marra shuffles his reader through a decade of tumult and torture. Their week-long adventure is interpolated by vignettes of trauma and love, spreading like a dark cloud from the village across Europe. ![]() He takes her to the nearest hospital, in the hopes that he can bank on the pity of a renowned and overextended surgeon. She is found the next day by their neighbour, the village's backwater doctor. As they pull up to the house, he sends his daughter out the back door and into the forest. In December of 2004, federalists abduct a man in the middle of the night. So Marra is investigating both the forest and the trees, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena develops into a fractal portrait that builds from the limited lives of individuals a larger picture of the flawed but infinite beauty of the human spirit. The effect is striking in the way it both calmed and disturbed this reader: despite the senseless present, a future will unfold and eventually cohere, and yet the very fact of this future makes the present-tense horrors of loss and dispossession all the more starkly articulated. Marra delicately intermingles these spheres and loads them up with details – the novel spills forward and backward through time like the surface tension finally breaking on the convex pool at the top of an over-filled water glass.Ī woman who exists in just a single, transient scene is sentenced to a life much longer than the book, the omniscient narrator following her from a moment in the sight lines of a main character waiting for a train well into the next year, where she will taste a lime for the first time the clauses pile around her until she's no longer in view and both prose and plot are forced to flow in another direction. Set for the most part over five days in 2004, at the height of the second Chechen war (in which the nation was ultimately, violently reclaimed as a Republic of Russia), A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is suffused with plenty of personal and political eruptions. How does humanity persist in the face of the horrors it brings upon itself? It doesn't need my assistance." A woman, pulled by fate and sisterly love, returns from the safety and promise of her burgeoning medical career in London to a newly ravaged Chechnya and wonders what she's doing at the bottom of a crater. Curious about how the book is going, someone asks him: "It's not writing itself?" The man winces and says, "History writes itself. How can a civilization, a person, survive so much and even remember to write it down? Another character spends his whole life recording a history of a land that barely seems to exist after becoming the theatre for back-to-back post-Soviet wars. ![]() The question persists throughout A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, albeit in different forms. ( From the publisher."How had civilization survived long enough to accumulate the knowledge contained in these books?" asks a character in Anthony Marra's quieting debut novel, as she stands before her sister's library with the ugly upheavals of war waging around and inside of her. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister.īut over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.įor the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels.Īcross the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. A resilient doctor risks everything to save the life of a hunted child, in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. ![]()
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