A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel

by Anthony Marra

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, hailed as “an absolute masterpiece” (Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly)—from the renowned author of Mercury Pictures Presents
 
“Extraordinary . . . a twenty-first century War and Peace.”—The New York Times Book Review

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD AWARD WINNER • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal

In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate.
 
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Kansas City Star, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780770436421
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/04/2014
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	112,777
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

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. Marra’s novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and France’s Prix Medicis. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He has lived and studied in Eastern Europe, and now resides in Oakland, California. His story collection, The Tsar of Love and Techno, is forthcoming from Hogarth (Fall 2015). Visit http://anthonymarra.net/

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Anthony Marra.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles. . . . 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. . . . I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Over and over again, this is an examination of the ways in which many broken pieces come together to make a new whole. In exquisite imagery, Marra tends carefully to the twisted strands of grace and tragedy. . . . Everything in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . . . is dignified with a hoping, aching heartbeat.”—Ramona Ausubel, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Marra is a brisk and able storyteller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war. . . . The writing is vivid throughout.”—The New Yorker
 
“Amazing . . . brilliant . . . one of the most accomplished and affecting books I’ve read in a very long time.”—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings, for NPR

“A powerful tale . . . rivals anything Michael Ondaatje has written in its emotional force. . . . There are many reasons to read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . . . to marvel at the lack of fear in a writer so young. To read a book that can bring tears to your eyes and force laughter from your lungs. . . . But the one I kept returning to, the best reason to read this novel, is that this story reminds us how senseless killing often wrenches kindness through extreme circumstances.”—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“Many people can write beautifully, but few manage to create a whole that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. Marra does this in spades. It is a brilliant book.”—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder
 
 “The most moving book I’ve read in years . . . A timeless tragedy about the victims of war.”—Washingtonian

“With remarkable pathos and a surprising amount of humor, Marra keeps the focus on the relationships, struggles, and tiny triumphs of an unforgettable group of characters. . . . Marra creates a specific and riveting world around his characters, expertly revealing the unexpected connections among them. . . . This novel, full of humanity and hope, ultimately leaves you uplifted. Constellation deserves to be on the short list for every major award. It’s an absolute masterpiece.”—Sarah Jessica Parker for Entertainment Weekly

“Marra is not looking to explain the inexplicable. He’s not laying out politics, his book does not run on fear or horror. He is, in capturing the experiences that form lives, telling what feels like a very real story set in Chechnya.”—Denver Post

“Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully. . . . His storytelling impulses are fed by wellsprings of generosity. . . . [The] ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Excellent . . . [A] grave, complex, elegant exploration of how war and occupation warp the human psyche.”—New York magazine

From the Publisher

Marra’s sobering, complex debut intertwines the stories of a handful of characters at the end of the second war in bleak, apocalyptic Chechnya. Though the novel spans 11 years, the story traces five days in 2004 following the arrest of Dokka, a villager from the small Muslim village of Eldar. His eight-year-old daughter escapes, and is rescued by Dokka’s friend Akhmed, the village doctor, who entrusts her to the care of Sonja, the lone remaining doctor at a nearby hospital. Why Akhmed feels responsible for Haava and chooses Sonja, an ethnic Russian keeping a vigil for her missing sister, as her guardian is one of many secrets; years of Soviet rule and the chaos of war have left these people unaccustomed to honesty. Marra, a Stegner Fellow, writes dense prose full of elegant detail about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war. Marra’s deliberate withholding of narrative detail makes the characters opaque, until all is revealed, in a surprisingly hopeful way, but there’s pleasure in reconstructing the meaning in reverse. As Akhmed says to Sonja, “The whole book is working toward the last page.” Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Narrator Colette Whitaker does a beautiful job with this stunningly accomplished first novel. Set in a tiny Chechen village during the wars, the story deals with human beings under the worst kinds of pressure life or art can devise, and looks at them straight on, with sympathy and depth and mercy. Whitaker must deal with Russian and Chechen accents; voices of men, women, and children; and characters that seem at first to be irredeemable but whose humanity is never in doubt. Again and again in this remarkable work you think you know what has happened and what it means, only to have it go wider and deeper. Whitaker’s voice is lovely, and her command of her craft is deft and sure. You won’t soon forget it. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2013 - AudioFile

Narrator Colette Whitaker does a beautiful job with this stunningly accomplished first novel. Set in a tiny Chechen village during the wars, the story deals with human beings under the worst kinds of pressure life or art can devise, and looks at them straight on, with sympathy and depth and mercy. Whitaker must deal with Russian and Chechen accents; voices of men, women, and children; and characters that seem at first to be irredeemable but whose humanity is never in doubt. Again and again in this remarkable work you think you know what has happened and what it means, only to have it go wider and deeper. Whitaker’s voice is lovely, and her command of her craft is deft and sure. You won’t soon forget it. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2013 - AudioFile

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. Marra's vision of Chechnya in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union is inevitably mordant: religious and separatist battles have left the roadways studded with land mines, the buildings pockmarked with bullets and many residents disappeared and tortured. The characters Marra brings to this landscape, though, are thankfully lacking in pieties about the indomitability of the human spirit. At the core of the story is Sonja, a longtime doctor with a flinty, seen-it-all demeanor who, as the story starts in 2004, has taken in an unlikely pair: Akhmed, a barely competent but well-intentioned doctor who is protecting Havaa, whose father has been abducted. Akhmed is quickly put to work learning to saw off shrapnel-flayed legs, and as the novel shifts back and forth in time, each of their stories deepens. The most affecting and harrowing subplot involves Sonja's sister Natasha, who is missing as the story begins; we quickly learn the various indignities she suffered in the years before, forced into prostitution and addicted to heroin but later recovered enough to help deliver babies alongside her sister. Marra has carefully threaded his characters to work an everybody-is-connected theme, and some of those connections ultimately feel contrived. But he's a careful, intelligent stylist who makes the most of his omniscient perspective; one of his favorite tricks is to project minor characters' fates into the future; by revealing their deaths, he exposes how shabbily war treats everybody and gives the living an additional dose of pathos. The grimness is persistent, but Marra relays it with unusual care and empathy for a first-timer. A somber, sensitive portrait of how lives fray and bind again in chaotic circumstances.

Kirkus Reviews