A scholar in the village toils his whole life on a history of “this sliver of humanity the world seemed determined to forget.” At more than 50,000 pages, the old man’s manuscript flows from a kind of mania, reaching further and further back to avoid the ire of Russian censors. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which many Chechens supported, Chechnya would become an autonomous republic of the new USSR, gaining health care, education and infrastructure. Not since Everything is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized. October 22, 2014 crobey12 Leave a comment. Ron Charles, ‘Anthony Marra’s ‘A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,’ reviewed by Ron Charles’, The Washington Post, (May 2013). It also creates a distance from its already not-very-believable characters, especially Havaa, who never feels like a flesh-and-blood child of war. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Anthony Marra, 2013 Crown Publishing 400 pp. Transcending Hardships By Saving Others In 'Constellation' May 25, 2013 • In his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra takes readers to … “She had the pale, waxen skin of an unripe pear,” Marra writes. ARTICLES. He has been to the Landfill before, when he was twenty-three, during the First Chechen War: for refusing to inform on his village, he was castrated. Other references draw us outside that 10-year range. More disconcerting is the continuing banter between characters; it seems at times as if every inhabitant of the region speaks like a character in an absurdist play. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . Review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which covers the recent conflict in Chechnya, review by John Barron Nurse Deshi, who helps out at the hospital, is an amalgam of a pantomime crone and one of Marquez’s earthy older people: ‘After twelve love affairs over the course of her seventy-three years, each beginning with a grander gesture, each ending with a more spectacular heartache, Deshi had learned to distrust men of every size and age, from newborns to great-grandfathers, knowing they all had it in them to break a decent woman’s heart.’ ‘He continues to speak without being spoken to,’ she says when she first meets Akhmed. Review A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . To view a constellation is to see each star’s past during the present. Havaa’s Barbie doll was donated by a ‘devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen so had had boxed up all but her Nativity figures and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation.’  She also treasures a box of objects bartered over the years by fleeing refugees for a safe place at Dokka’s house: among them, the plastic figurine of a ballerina in pirouette and a field guide to Caucasian flora. The surgeon, who assumes she has cauterized her affections, spars with Akhmed in a way that tempts us to anticipate some romantic engagement, maybe even a little happiness. Khassan himself is a fit 79-year-old veteran of the Red Army, having frozen his balls, as he tells Akhmed, through nine different time zones over sixteen years of service . ( From the publisher .) A decade of war in Chechnya informs this multivalent, heartfelt debut, filled with broken families, lost limbs and valiant efforts to find scraps of hope and dignity. But then, too, there are moments of mercy in this tale, grace notes when Marra casually alludes to what certain characters will be doing far in the future; yes, he assures us, some of these people you care about — or loathe — will live deep into the 21st century. Those who survived were only able to return after his death in 1953. Oliver Bullough is disturbed by the use of Chechnya’s suffering as colour for a novel. But it is art that shines brightest in the novel’s cosmology. From the New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art. In this haunting masterwork, award-winning author Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya. Fearing the loss of other mineral-rich territories, and facing internal unrest, President Yeltsin besieged the Chechen capital, Grozny. Anthony Marra’s first novel, A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA, opens as Havaa, an eight-year-old girl hiding in the woods, watches her father Dokka being abducted by Russian soldiers in the middle of the night in a war-torn village in Chechnya. Instead, Marra concentrates on moments of human grace, no matter how humble. Yet in the very act of aligning a creative embrace of happenstance with the cycle of the seasons there is an article of faith.’. Driving this intense tragedy is an ordinary man, Ramzan, a young neighbor who was poisoned by pain, driven to accept his role as village rat. The second war had its roots in the First Chechen War (aka the War in Chechnya). A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra Review: 5 out of 5 stars This was a whirlwind of a book. Ronald McDonald is the President of the United States, Akhmed claims. But can a book about atrocity be too miraculous? . Instead, these are just fathers and mothers and children — neighbors snagged in the claws of history. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is densely imagined, and yet cinematic in the after-image … There are perhaps too many coincidences to be sustained. Check out Anthony Marra’s website. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Anthony Marra. The narrator’s watery fancies of libraries turning into vessels become hard to distinguish from the hallucinations of the shipwreck survivors she’s researching . He does this partly out of a sense of loyalty to his father, who needs diabetes medicine, but Khassan, who hasn’t spoken to him for almost two years, feeds the food he brings home to a pack of stray dogs. But a trip to the Landfill after being caught by Russian troops cost Dokka his fingers and, ultimately, his life, when Ramzan turns him in. In the twentieth century, this history would only become more complex. May 2013. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra 50,421 ratings, 4.09 average rating, 6,735 reviews Open Preview A Constellation of Vital ... ― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Hogarth, $26 (400p) ISBN 978-0-7704-3640-7. Staffed by a single nurse, a one-armed guard and a Russian surgeon searching for her sister, it’s a madhouse but also a sanctuary, where strands of absurdity and realism mingle without clashing. This time around, as we see in the novel, a corrupt Russian army (often in collaboration with Chechen criminals) has reduced Chechens’ lives to a precarious bare existence. You can find a similar boldness in Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (2011), which threaded magic realism into the Balkans conflict, and even Nam Le’s The Boat (2008) falls into this company, with its stories’ quietly flamboyant demonstration of geographic reach. While she was working at the hospital, Natasha drew the view of lost Volchansk onto the cardboard covering its windows; in a proleptic flash we learn that these drawings will be kept by Sonja and appear eventually in an exhibition. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena deserves the adoration it has quickly garnered. . A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, his first novel, will be published in fifteen countries. . . 12. The book begins with a sentence that forecasts both the horror and the whimsy ahead: “On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.” Havaa, we learn, is 8 and now almost certainly orphaned. Twenty-eight-year-old Marra is at the young end of a generation confident about embracing the world, including its dark matter, with the narrative cleverness and even playfulness of a rediscovered postmodernism. 6,725 reviews. Then there is the enormity of its subject – the recent Chechen Wars – to which we can add the author’s youthfulness on publishing his first novel amid significant buzz. ‘I love the idea of books being more than books,’ he said, ‘or being, rather, something other than books.’. It hews to the historical record. ISBN-13: 9780770436421 Summary 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. Eggers told the story of his parents’ deaths with self-mocking grandeur; while Smith’s group of angry Muslim youths in London laboured under the acronym KEVIN. In the village of Eldár, Khassan’s son, Ramzan, is both an opportunist and a victim, eking a living from the shifting criminal economy of war by running weapons for a sheikh, and later by informing for the Russians. Around a third would die en route. Sex slavery. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena at Amazon.com. The novel also zigzags needlessly across time. ISBN-13: 9780770436421 Summary 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. In the morning, he finds Dokka’s eight-year-old daughter, Havaa, who has managed to flee into the snowy woods. But the unforgettable characters in this novel are not federalists or rebels or terrorists. Delia Falconer. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance. by Anthony Marra. by Anthony Marra ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2013. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is the 2013 debut novel by American author Anthony Marra.The story, told from an omniscient point of view, begins one morning in 2004 in the small Chechen village of Eldár.The night before, a villager named Dokka was captured and taken by Federalist soldiers, and his house was burned to the ground. By putting this novel into the hands of his characters, Marra can signal – without having to explain – the roots of this conflict, which has caught the North Caucasus and Russia in a long, not always hostile, embrace. Anthony Marra’s first novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” is a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles. After 41 villagers are disappeared one night – the event that triggers his wife’s dementia – Akhmed paints their portraits (adding a wart to the nose of a woman who never paid for his obstetric services) and nails them up around the village. read. Their experiences come to us in pungent flashbacks of trauma and joy — meals and games, marriages and affairs, offenses small and shocking that knit their lives together. *** Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 ***In a snow-covered village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as her father is abducted in the middle of the night by Russian soldiers. The story, which happens in Chechnya, moving to and fro in time over ongoing history, incorporates some extreme scenes, for example, portrayals of torment and removal. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular. Praise for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena “Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, a story about desperate lives in a remote land that will quickly seem impossibly close and important. Murád, a noble Avar chieftain caught between warring local and Russian forces, defects to the Russians in order to save his family: though he is double-crossed, and dies. Published July 23, 2013 Fiction. Akhmed is the novel’s major representative of humanity, able to hold onto his good nature and sense of humour even in the face of certain death. This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. In fact, the novel’s soft magic realism brings it as close to the reassuring closure of free-to-air television or the American self-help canon as the fabulist tradition from which it borrows. Delia Falconer is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers.... for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. Read Full Review >> Rave Ron Charles , The Washington Post A Constellation of Vital Phenomena opens in a tiny, blood-soaked village of Chechnya, that part of the world that drifts into our consciousness only briefly — when, say, the Russians crush it again or, more recently, when young zealots detonate pressure cookers in Boston. The sisters’ relationship is prickly: as Sonja puts it to herself, she would cross the country for her sister, but not a room. Each chapter begins with the date highlighted on a timeline that runs from 1994 to 2004, jumping forward and backward, sometimes creating new mysteries, sometimes solving old ones. Her father, who nurtured her curiosity with extravagant affection, was an arborist who had lost his fingers in a previous encounter with the Feds and a pair of bolt cutters. In A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra explores the emotional complexities of life in a war-plagued place, as the upheaval of conflict and death reshape the ties of family, friends, neighbors, and tradition. The region was left almost hopelessly fragmented, crime-torn, and run by warlords. Prev The Second Chechen War, according to Politskovskaya, was much worse than the first, during which some neighbourliness survived. For an American writer, his grasp on Chechnya seems authentic. . It follows a few people's stories during the Chechen Wars from 1996 to 2004. This sense of wanting to be more than a book applies just as aptly to Marra’s novel. The complicated moral hero of this tale is an incompetent peasant doctor named Akhmed, who lives across the street. “We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.”. When Sonja scoffs that he can’t be serious, he replies, ‘English names all sound the same’. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is filled with small handmade memorials that form another kind of constellation around its characters. The Stanford Book Salon: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena with Anthony Marra - Duration: 58:32. In this ravaged building, where only the trauma and maternity wards are still open, tough Sonja, an ethnic Russian and brilliant surgeon, is the last doctor remaining – and still traumatised by her own sister Natasha’s mysterious disappearance. Dementia is not, admittedly, a happy outcome, but in a world whose most awful fact is its uncertainty such glimpses work against the agony of not-knowing that is central to the Chechnyan experience. About A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. The Whiting Writers’ Award selection committee dubbed Marra’s ambitions “Tolstoyan,” and there could not be a better word to describe his all-too-real cast of characters. It follows a few people 's stories during the Chechen Wars from to... 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