a constellation of vital phenomena review

For a first-time novelist, Anthony Marra has a lot going for him. On one level, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” covers just five days in 2004. Anthony Marra’s fascinating debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, was set in a ravaged Chechen hospital, and he expands both his scope and ambition for this intriguing collection of … The only recent parallel that comes to mind is the maturity of Jennifer duBois’ debut A Partial History of Lost Causes. 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. . 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. Fri., Aug. 9, 2013 timer 3 min. Ron Charles of the Washington Post described it as ‘a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles.’. Yet in Marra’s novel everything is so illuminated by Art and Hope that it is hard to feel as moved as one would wish; or rather, one risks being more moved by an ahistorical sense of art’s capacity to move than the very particular plight of Chechnya itself. 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. 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. Review of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which covers the recent conflict in Chechnya, review by John Barron —Madison Smartt Bell, New York Times Book Review “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless....[Marra is] a lover not a fighter, a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything … The contours of time and place erode. This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. ‘There’s no hunger in your tongue,’ she replies. Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio. It hews to the historical record. The Chechnya of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a world of haunted objects, whose very specific little stories give a sense, far more eloquently than any tranche of exposition, of its tragic place in world affairs. On Monday, Anthony Marra will be at Politics & Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. . Be warned: There’s a section of “A Constellation” splattered with viscera that will scar your conscience and remind you what the United States risks by blurring the hard-won moral and legal prohibitions against torture. This relentless polishing becomes a kind of anaesthetic, sparing us from the hurts and despairs the novel chronicles so well. In a chilling act of Orwellian naming, Russia’s troops, often comprising the dregs of its prisons, have established ‘filtration points’, interrogation centres set up in the republic’s decaying industrial infrastructure, where Chechens are tortured and released, or, more often, disappeared. A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA is a spectacular debut novel about endurance and resilience amidst the insanity of war. As A Jealous Tide continues, MacDonald abandons the apparatus of realism in favour of a more playful and elaborate approach. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena came to me highly recommended. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. This last line is also the epigraph of Marra’s novel. Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post. Art, rather than fate, becomes the dominant form of enchantment, the novel more than a novel, part of a constellation of talismanic objects it includes within itself. 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. Our work is made possible through the support of the following organizations: Ron Charles, ‘Anthony Marra’s ‘A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,’ reviewed by Ron Charles’. First there is its title’s announcement of cosmic ambition. 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. Ron Charles, ‘Anthony Marra’s ‘A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,’ reviewed by Ron Charles’, The Washington Post, (May 2013). But those thugs will be back, fulfilling a new order to murder the family members of anyone suspected of sympathizing with rebel forces. As the novel opens in the village of Eldár, Akhmed, an incompetent doctor, has watched a group of ‘Feds’ (Russian soldiers) arrive in the night, abduct his friend Dokka, and burn down his house. 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. In “A Constellation,” the surreal has been stamped into flesh and bone. 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. The sisters’ relationship is prickly: as Sonja puts it to herself, she would cross the country for her sister, but not a room. Marra also offers the consolation of surprise connections between his major characters; in two instances these are genetic. LONGLIST, 2013 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. Not only that genre, one might add; it is as much a problem for contemporary literary fiction, as some critics noted of The Tiger’s Wife and Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). 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. The traffic outside filtered through the windows takes on the rhythmic sound of waves; the railing, encircling the library’s upstairs gallery, becomes a ship’s deck, listing in the breeze; the ladders are knotted ropes over the sides of a sinking ship. “We are the children of wolves,” Ramzan says. What does A Constellation of Vital Phenomena ultimately say about anguish and joy? ANTHONY MARRA is the author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and appeared on over twenty year-end lists. Once caught up in it, this novel will breathlessly spin you around and around. Overview. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular. Mark Weiss/Getty Images May 3, 2013 4:28 pm ET Marra manages to translate much of this knottiness into human terms without entangling the reader. A surfeit of other stories (and micro-stories like little flashes of bioluminescence) presses around its central drama. To view a constellation is to see each star’s past during the present. 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. Call 202-364-1919. I feel that to hold this novel steady, I would need to read it twice, a statement which for me… A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, review. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra: Review. For this reason, Stalin ordered the mass deportation of the population to Central Asia in 1944. It is the same with the objects in this book, which are so often scrupulously enumerated and restored to an exact sense of their provenance (those 40 toes in Sonja’s neighbour’s shoes). This strategy of superaddition is partly a reaction to Chechnya’s complex history of suffering, a way of registering its weight and layers. Check out Anthony Marra’s website. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a sweeping novel that uncovers the characters' pasts and propels them into the future. “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. During World War Two, many Chechens fought for the Red Army, though some farm workers, resenting collectivisation, helped the Germans in their push through the Caucasus. Hogarth, $26 (400p) ISBN 978-0-7704-3640-7. As this tense – though often absurd – story continues, the novel flashes back into the past. . The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and published at the rate of one a year, set in part at the time of their composition, responding to events as they unfolded in the wake of the bitterly fought Brexit referendum of 2016. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena at Amazon.com. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is ambitious and intellectually restless. BOOK REVIEW. This is particularly risky for him, as his village has at least one informer, Ramzan, the son of his good friend Khassan, while Sonja herself would swap him and Havaa in a moment for her sister. 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. Published July 23, 2013 Fiction. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. . Charles is the fiction editor of The Washington Post. Having recently read two excellent novels by Aminatta Forna (The Memory of Love and The Hired Man) and also Richard Flanagan's truly outstanding and exquisitely written The Narrow Road to the Deep North, I wondered if I could face being immersed in the horrors of … The almost-empty hospital where Akhmed hides Havaa provides a weird alternative world to the grim village. ED. Sonja’s family was part of the influx of Russian immigrants after the Stalinist deportation. The roots of both these conflicts go back to Russia’s mid-nineteenth-century occupation of the North Caucasus. Other references draw us outside that 10-year range. 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. Anthony Marra is a writer to watch and savor.” —T.C. The region was left almost hopelessly fragmented, crime-torn, and run by warlords. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. The difficulties are all there in the novel’s first line (again, reminiscent of Marquez), which grafts the whimsical to the awful: ‘On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from a dream of sea anemones.’ Further in, the little girl’s hands do not simply hold, but ‘bracelet’ Akhmed’s wrist, while her house is reduced to poetic ‘char’. 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. Marra was guided by, among other books, the work of assassinated Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. They aren’t particularly religious or political; we see only glimpses of loyal Russian officers or fanatical Muslims. War crimes thrive, unpoliced and unwitnessed: kidnapping for ransom, theft, rape, torture and mutilation are everyday occurrences. Marra’s ability to concentrate and humanise Chechnya’s plight is particularly impressive; the fact that he focuses his attention on women’s role in war (and chooses a little girl as the symbol of Chechnya’s future) is particularly welcome. The Second Chechen War, according to Politskovskaya, was much worse than the first, during which some neighbourliness survived. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel at Amazon.com. Go ahead and sneer at the thin atmosphere of America’s MFA programs, but this Washington-born graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a testament to the vibrancy of contemporary fiction. ‘Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. ARTICLES. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Not since Everything is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized. 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. A brilliant debut novel that brings to life an abandoned hospital where a tough-minded doctor decides to harbor a hunted young girl, with powerful consequences. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Anthony Marra, 2013 Crown Publishing 400 pp. 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. 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. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena Anthony Marra Review by Megan Fishmann. Lim paints a hard-nosed portrait of middle-aged, single and queer womanhood encircled by the long tail of patriarchy, bolstered by the senseless weaponisation of cultural traditions and the burden of expectation. More By and About This Author. 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. 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. Those who survived were only able to return after his death in 1953. I was considering the entirety of this as I read — and remained in — Anthony Marra’s astonishing first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. My expectations were high. 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. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra Publisher: Hogarth Published: February 2014 Genre: literary fiction, historical fiction ISBN: 9780770436421 Rating: ★★★.5 In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. 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