Anthony Marra

I don’t normally read short stories as I either find them ho-hum or I am left wanting more, a lot more. In short I am always left feeling frustrated. So why did I pick up yet another collection of short stories? Because I had a quick dip inside and it was like finding gold. I jumped in and nearly cried when I finished it. Each “short story” is connected to another somewhere in the book.

There is more cleverness, wonder and magic in this one book that any I have read since Riddley show more Walker. Beyond that I find the Soviet era fascinating in its bizarreness and this book meets that and then some.

I will be reading more by this guy. show less

Set in Russia from the 1930s to the 2010s, and spanning the country from Siberia to Chechnya, this book covers a block of Russian history, showing many hardships and losses faced by the people, and bringing these down to a personal level. Primary characters include a censor, ballerina, a pair of brothers, a prisoner of war, a drug dealer, and a scam artist. The book starts out as a series of short stories, but they gradually become more interrelated. By the end, it feels like reading a show more novel.

Marra employs humor to offset the many tragic segments. One of my favorite stories is “The Grozny Tourist Bureau,” in which a man is charged with creating a travel brochure to lure tourists to war-torn Chechnya: “Upon seeing the empty space where an apartment block once stood, I wrote wide and unobstructed skies! I watched jubilantly as a pack of feral dogs chased a man, and wrote unexpected encounters with natural wildlife! The city bazaar hummed with the sales of looted industrial equipment, humanitarian aid rations, and munitions suited for every occasion: unparalleled shopping opportunities at the Grozny bazaar! Even before I reached the first checkpoint, I had scribbled first-rate security! The copy wrote itself; the real challenge was finding images that substantiated it.”

Marra is an expressive, intelligent writer and I enjoy his style. The content is sad, and I liked some parts more than others, as it typical in a series of stories, but the penultimate chapter brings everything together. The final story is “out there.” I also recommend A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. show less

Hollywood is all about the real, the unreal, and even the anti-real. And how they all relate to one another, sometimes, like here, with deep ironies.

Marra places World War II, refugee immigrants, fascist homelands, poignant moments, and very well-drawn characters into that mix. It comes out fully baked and has some real wow-that’s-cool moments.

As I got into the book, its scope and feel reminded me of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Sure enough, in his Acknowledgments, Marra cites DeLillo’s show more book as an influence on this one. The geography, the history, and the epic feel is all there.

It’s set in the 1940s, although flashbacks and memories take us back to earlier times, especially in Italy with the growth of fascism there and its effects on some of the central characters.

The most central character is Maria Lagana. At the beginning of the story Maria works at Mercury Pictures, mostly a B-movie production studio in Hollywood. Her boss, Artie, runs the studio, but he absolutely depends on Maria. Artie’s a bit of a scattered mess on his own. Maria makes it all work.

Marra takes us back into Maria’s childhood in Italy. Her father, Giuseppe, was a prominent defense lawyer, defending victims of fascist oppression. Maria, as a child, accidentally exposed her father’s written thoughts and records to the fascists, in an episode I’ll save for others to read fresh for themselves. Her father was confined to the city of San Lorenzo, really a kind of open prison city whose occupants, like Giuseppe, cannot leave and must find a way to make a living and a home of sorts there.

Maria and her mother, Annunziata, leave as refugees to the United States, where Maria eventually finds a place for herself in Hollywood at Mercury Pictures.

Mercury Pictures is home to other refugees, German and Italian, with “enemy alien” status once the US enters the war. It wasn’t just Japanese who suffered losses of freedom and respect during the war — as immigrants from enemy countries, Maria and the others are, in blatant irony given her father’s confinement, unable to travel freely beyond their homes. Not all are allowed to continue working at their jobs, and all feel themselves under suspicion of disloyalty in the war.

As Annunziata says, " In Italy, the antifacsists are arrested for crimes they didn’t commit, and here? Here they’re arrested for crimes they are the victims of.”

Mercury Pictures meanwhile produces patriotic movies, eventually including indoctrination and propaganda films under the direction of the US Defense Department.

The book virtually feeds on irony. And the central irony is of a movie studio producing movies for the public and propaganda for the military, extolling the cause of freedom, when so many of the people making those movies do not enjoy those freedoms.

And there are ironies within ironies. The propaganda films used actual combat footage shot by the Signal Corps. But that film of real combat wasn’t convincing to a public educated by movies with a Hollywood version of what combat “really” was. The propaganda films had to be upgraded to match movie reality.

In some ways as central as Maria’s character is her boyfriend Eddie. Eddie is Chinese, but because Japanese actors are unavailable for Mercury’s productions that depict evil Japanese villains, and because to the general public Chinese and Japanese people look so much alike, Eddie fills in and makes a living portraying those Japanese villains.

Eddie’s not really happy about that, of course. One day he goes to a movie theatre and watches one of his own movies. He’s spotted by three Navy sailors whose minds conflate Eddie the actor with Eddie’s villainous character on the screen. They chase him from the theater out onto the street.

Eddie gets away, but the episode sticks. He and Maria hatch a movie idea, based on that very idea of Eddie being mistaken for his character. It’s a brilliantly poignant idea, and Maria manages to get Artie behind it. Production begins on a movie in which Eddie flees the sailors, runs onto the set of one of his own movies where he portrayed that Japanese villain, and can’t find his way out. Trapped in his own character.

It’s brilliant, on Eddie’s and Maria’s part, which means on Marra’s part.

I won’t go farther with the plot. There are so many central characters, so many poignant ironies, and there’s an ending that will push the reader to think hard about the costs of forgiveness.

Great book. show less

Okay..this is a war novel so not a sunny story. But the writing, character development, and story telling are so well done that this book is my current favorite of 2015. It opens at the end of 2004 in a small war torn Chechen village with 8 year old Haava whose home has just been fire bombed by Russian forces, killing her father. Her father's friend and neighbor, Akhmed, covertly takes her to the remains of a hospital in the neighboring town with the hopes that she will be concealed and show more cared for by a female doctor that he has heard of, Sonja.

The Chechen wars (2) covered in the novel take place from 1994 through 2004, but the author has a talent for telescoping time to give the reader an over view of the history from hundreds of years ago, through the Stalin era, and the recent decade of war. In various parts of the story, he extends the view into the future of some of the characters to bring the story to the present day.

The three main characters, Haava, Akhmed, and Sonja are beautifully drawn and they are connected through the story by many different threads. And though the novel informs the reader about a long history, the actual story arc takes place over less than 5 days. This debut novel reveals to us an author with a rare level of talent for story telling. show less