A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
by Anthony Marra
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In a rural village in December 2004 Chechnya, a failed doctor Akhmed harbors the traumatized 8-year-old daughter of a father abducted by Russian forces and treats a series of wounded rebels and refugees while exploring the shared past that binds him to the child.Tags
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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 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 show more 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
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 show more 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
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: 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. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal show more the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. 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.
My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-first, discuss a book you expected to hate but ended up loving.
Yes.
Now, there is always a matter of taste when it comes to appreciating or otherwise a given writer's work. Do the writer's words ring you like a bell? Do they smack you in the chops? Do they slither into your ears emitting glassy slime like a hagfish? That's the chief factor in determining your ultimate response to a work. I think some writers are equivalent of chocolatiers, making bonbon after truffle upon caramel. Lovely taken one at a time; urpsome in bulk. I think Marra is a chocolatier of a writer in this book.
Mmmmm. Yum. Sing it, Brother Anthony, sing it.
Yes. I concur. A bit baroque, permabehaps, but yes.
Oh gag me! A milk chocolate strawberry creme-filled emetic-level Whitman's Sampler spitback!
So here I was, alternately uplifted and revolted, and still...this story made me stop what I was thinking and attend to it, and that's no mean feat. The horror of stories about war is, for me, only partially touched by the battles and the soldiers and the wounds they inflict on themselves and each other. The people whose lives are utterly upended by wars fought in their name and on their land are so often simply disappeared in toponymic abstraction (eg, the Mexican-American War). This novel doesn't look so much at the war as at the warred-over place and its inhabitants.
Marra's gift is in making images of the place vivid:
And the people who live in the violated, wounded place:
It's a very well-made book, it's got a helluva wallop of a message, and it's fun to read. I was expecting nothing more than a flashy MFA-from-Iowa-Writers'-Workshop meretricious bauble. Some parts of the book are, in fact, that very thing. One's own taste determines where the balance point lies. Are there more surprisingly good moments than there are expectedly Shiny-Brite ones?
And there I say yes. Yes, this is more beautiful than brummagem.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
The Publisher Says: 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. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal show more the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. 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.
My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is the twenty-first, discuss a book you expected to hate but ended up loving.
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
Yes.
Now, there is always a matter of taste when it comes to appreciating or otherwise a given writer's work. Do the writer's words ring you like a bell? Do they smack you in the chops? Do they slither into your ears emitting glassy slime like a hagfish? That's the chief factor in determining your ultimate response to a work. I think some writers are equivalent of chocolatiers, making bonbon after truffle upon caramel. Lovely taken one at a time; urpsome in bulk. I think Marra is a chocolatier of a writer in this book.
There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.
Mmmmm. Yum. Sing it, Brother Anthony, sing it.
Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.
Yes. I concur. A bit baroque, permabehaps, but yes.
For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.
Oh gag me! A milk chocolate strawberry creme-filled emetic-level Whitman's Sampler spitback!
So here I was, alternately uplifted and revolted, and still...this story made me stop what I was thinking and attend to it, and that's no mean feat. The horror of stories about war is, for me, only partially touched by the battles and the soldiers and the wounds they inflict on themselves and each other. The people whose lives are utterly upended by wars fought in their name and on their land are so often simply disappeared in toponymic abstraction (eg, the Mexican-American War). This novel doesn't look so much at the war as at the warred-over place and its inhabitants.
Marra's gift is in making images of the place vivid:
The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor peculiarities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.
And the people who live in the violated, wounded place:
As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain.
It's a very well-made book, it's got a helluva wallop of a message, and it's fun to read. I was expecting nothing more than a flashy MFA-from-Iowa-Writers'-Workshop meretricious bauble. Some parts of the book are, in fact, that very thing. One's own taste determines where the balance point lies. Are there more surprisingly good moments than there are expectedly Shiny-Brite ones?
Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.
And there I say yes. Yes, this is more beautiful than brummagem.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less
“For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow.”
- Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Powerful narrative about the horrors of the wars in Chechnya, focusing on five days in the Second Chechan War in 2004 and flashing back to the prior ten years, including the First Chechan War. Havaa, an eight-year-old girl living in rural Chechnya, is rescued by a neighbor, Akhmed, after her father is abducted by Russian security forces. Akhmed, a barely competent doctor and artist, takes Havaa to a distant hospital, show more run by Sonja, a skilled doctor whose sister is missing. The story is a slowly-building patchwork quilt of characters and storylines. It is centered around interpersonal relationships and reactions to the chaos of war.
Marra’s writing is stellar and his characters are deeply drawn. The novel shifts back and forth in time, providing pieces of the story from different characters’ points of view. Themes include responses to fear, betrayal, the atrocities of war, moral conscience, the attempt to save others, and the desire to retain a shred of optimism in midst of relentless suffering.
Sensitive readers beware: I felt a bit queasy at times reading scenes of torture, castration, execution, amputation, human trafficking, and the aftermath of exploding landmines. It was a challenge in the beginning to continue to read about the carnage of war and humankind’s inhumanity to fellow humans but by the end I was glad to have endured. I admired the author’s skill at bringing together the interrelated personal stories into a cohesive whole. It was an emotionally draining story of people trying to retain compassion and hope in the wake of horrific brutality. Recommended to readers of literary historical fiction that can handle a large dose of darkness, misery, cruelty, and tragedy. show less
I almost resent reading really good books because I can never find the right words to describe them, much less convey my personal feelings about them. This is not a perfect book. It is overwritten in places, the kind of overwritten where you can see the author putting to good use all the clever things he learned in his MFA program or writing workshop, and the non-linear narrative is occasionally disorienting, though I think that may have been intentional at some level. There are a few other issues with it but none major enough to quibble over. While it may not be a perfect book, it was a perfect book for me, speaking to my head and my heart in different but equally affecting ways.
Anthony Marra’s novel is the story of an old man, three show more friends, two sisters, and one little girl. How they are all connected and how they have each shaped the others’ lives is what the book is about. Though set during the first and second Chechen wars, like any good story, the specifics of the setting could be changed and the story would be no less powerful. The ties of family and the betrayal of friends, the shape of absence, and the pain of grief are all universal, and it is these things that Marra is exploring and trying to make sense of.
There is a beautiful rhythm to Marra’s writing; I actually found myself reading some passages out loud. The hardship and torture he describes with such care take on a beauty of their own, and that tension adds an extra dimension to the story that only enhances it. The narrative is scattered with asides describing the future of this or that person we have just met, as if to assure us of the inevitability of fate and the continuation of life despite the present horrors.
I had very little interest in this book when it came out, and I can’t say for sure what made me decide to request it from the library. But I am so glad I did (despite the many tears shed). And this imperfect book, full of flawed people and hopelessness kept at bay by little more than a memory of what could be, gets five stars from me. show less
Anthony Marra’s novel is the story of an old man, three show more friends, two sisters, and one little girl. How they are all connected and how they have each shaped the others’ lives is what the book is about. Though set during the first and second Chechen wars, like any good story, the specifics of the setting could be changed and the story would be no less powerful. The ties of family and the betrayal of friends, the shape of absence, and the pain of grief are all universal, and it is these things that Marra is exploring and trying to make sense of.
There is a beautiful rhythm to Marra’s writing; I actually found myself reading some passages out loud. The hardship and torture he describes with such care take on a beauty of their own, and that tension adds an extra dimension to the story that only enhances it. The narrative is scattered with asides describing the future of this or that person we have just met, as if to assure us of the inevitability of fate and the continuation of life despite the present horrors.
I had very little interest in this book when it came out, and I can’t say for sure what made me decide to request it from the library. But I am so glad I did (despite the many tears shed). And this imperfect book, full of flawed people and hopelessness kept at bay by little more than a memory of what could be, gets five stars from me. show less
I was a bit skeptical at first - you need to have guts to set your debut during the second Chechen war and write about experiences of ordinary Chechens while being an American. But I must admit that Anthony Marra pulled it through. In the author note, he explains where he drew his inspiration from, he did his research and he visited Chechnya. There is enough factual background and accuracy and then there is the brilliant prose, which convinces you, the characters and setting come alive and you want to believe it. A war, especially such a brutal and unjust one, is a great backdrop for a setting where people need to deal with very difficult moral dilemmas, make improbable compromises, face their deepest fears and harshest tests. But show more nevertheless, in the deepest despair there can also be felt great happiness as the ending of the book shows.
I will definitely be reading more by the author. I especially enjoyed the dark and sharp humor. show less
I will definitely be reading more by the author. I especially enjoyed the dark and sharp humor. show less
Incredible achievement, especially for a first novel. I’m surprised this book didn’t make the NYT list of best books of the 21st century. It covers the two Chechen wars, (the first beginning in 1994 and the second in 1999) and their impact on everyday life in a village in Chechnya. The book is incredibly well-researched, but it wears its knowledge lightly, sharing it through story and dialogue rather than description. (There are no ‘info-dumps’). The emphasis is on the impact of the wars on a select number of characters and their interactions over these years. The book is constructed so well, all the clues being placed along the way, leading to outcomes that--when you get to them--seem inevitable. It’s a very dark book and, in show more parts, incredibly violent, but this is balanced by some humour and even Catch-22-like satire. show less
“For years he’d lived with the fear of murder, torture, or disappearance, as all men of his age did, and it was the senselessness that truly frightened him; that the monumental finality of death could come arbitrarily was more terrifying than the eternity to follow.”
- Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Powerful narrative about the horrors of the wars in Chechnya, focusing on five days in the Second Chechan War in 2004 and flashing back to the prior ten years, including the First Chechan War. Havaa, an eight-year-old girl living in rural Chechnya, is rescued by a neighbor, Akhmed, after her father is abducted by Russian security forces. Akhmed, a barely competent doctor and artist, takes Havaa to a distant show more hospital, run by Sonja, a skilled doctor whose sister is missing. The story is a slowly-building patchwork quilt of characters and storylines. It is centered around interpersonal relationships and reactions to the chaos of war.
Marra’s writing is stellar and his characters are deeply drawn. The novel shifts back and forth in time, providing pieces of the story from different characters’ points of view. Themes include responses to fear, betrayal, the atrocities of war, moral conscience, the attempt to save others, and the desire to retain a shred of optimism in midst of relentless suffering.
Sensitive readers beware: I felt a bit queasy at times reading scenes of torture, castration, execution, amputation, human trafficking, and the aftermath of exploding landmines. It was a challenge in the beginning to continue to read about the carnage of war and humankind’s inhumanity to fellow humans but by the end I was glad to have endured. I admired the author’s skill at bringing together the interrelated personal stories into a cohesive whole. It was an emotionally draining story of people trying to retain compassion and hope in the wake of horrific brutality. Recommended to readers of literary historical fiction that can handle a large dose of darkness, misery, cruelty, and tragedy. show less
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This novel is, among other things, a meditation on the use and abuse of history, and an inquiry into the extent to which acts of memory may also constitute acts of survival.
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Author Information
5+ Works 4,311 Members
Anthony Marra received a bachelor's degree from the University of Southern California and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Narrative Magazine, and MAKE Magazine. His short story Chechnya won a 2010 Pushcart Prize and the 2010 Narrative Prize. His debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, was show more published in 2013 and received the inaugural John Leonard Prize. He also received 2018 Simpson Family Literary Prize. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Some Editions
Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- Original title
- A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- Original publication date
- 2013
- People/Characters
- Havaa; Akhmed; Sofia Andreyevna "Sonja" Rabina; Dokka; Ramzan; Khassan (show all 10); Natasha; Ula; Deshi; Maali
- Important places
- Chechnya; Eldár, Chechnya; Volchansk, Chechnya
- Important events
- Chechen conflict
- Epigraph
- It was of this death that I was reminded by the crushed thistle in the midst of the plowed field.
-Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murad - Dedication
- To my parents and sister
- First words
- On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones.
- Quotations
- She was harder to pin down than the last pickle in the jar.
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena---organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
“A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.” (Abu’s brother - p. 108)
“And where are the books I asked for?”
“...A third cousin in the West is asking for them from Amazon.”
“What’s that?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then in London you will be an au pair. Do you know what that is? It’s a French word. It means you will watch the children while the parents are at work.”
“So I will be a grandmother?” (p. 196) - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)What all heard, what all remembered, was the fingerless man leaning back in the doctor's arms, lifting his face, and laughing, a sound none had heard in many days, his cheeks wet as he roared a name—Havaa, Havaa, Havaa—and those witnessed would remember how here, in Pit B, a man who had lost his freedom and his fingers, and would soon lose his life, had found in that name an immense, spinning joy.
- Publisher's editor
- Sagnette, Lindsay
- Blurbers
- Patchett, Ann; Johnson, Adam; Boyle, T.C.; Meloy, Maile; Lam, Vincent; Parker, Sarah Jessica (show all 11); Wolitzer, Meg; Charles, Ron; Ausubel, Ramona; Freeman, John; Sacks, Sam
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