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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel, by Anthony Marra
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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 his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa's house. But when he finds her 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 the talented, tough-minded 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. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: Harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave 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.
- Sales Rank: #7550 in Audible
- Published on: 2013-05-07
- Released on: 2013-05-07
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 728 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
209 of 223 people found the following review helpful.
Beautifully written and evocative. I just didn't quite "get it" as much as others...
By Larry Hoffer
If you read as much as I do (or even if you don't), you're bound to come across a book that is hailed by literary critics and readers as one of the greatest things ever, but no matter how much you try and read it and are determined to love it, it just doesn't click for you. I know that happens most often with the classics, but it certainly happens with "regular" fiction and nonfiction as well.
Anthony Marra's debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, is such a book for me. Reviews have hailed it as everything from "brilliant" and "haunting" to "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles."
One day, in a snowy village in war-torn Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides as Russian soldiers abduct her father, Dokka, in the middle of the night. Their kindly neighbor, Akhmed, fears the worst when he sees the soldiers setting fire to Dokka's house as they take him away, but he rescues Havaa from her hiding place. Fearing she will be discovered, Akhmed takes Havaa to the local hospital, abandoned but for one doctor, Sonja, who alone (with the help of one cantankerous nurse) has been treating all of the victims of war and illness that enter the dilapidated hospital's doors. Akhmed, who was a medical student at the very bottom of his class, promises to work as a doctor with Sonja to ensure Havaa is provided for.
Sonja comes with her own set of issues, most notably her sister, Natasha, who has continuously disappeared and reappeared in Sonja's life, but has been missing for some time. And Akhmed is caring for his own bedridden wife, and worrying about his neighbor and childhood friend, who is an informant for the Russians. But Sonja and Akhmed forge a reluctant partnership, one which opens both of their eyes to the surprising connections that tie them together.
For me, while there's no doubt that Marra is a tremendously talented writer who has created some memorable characters and some beautiful sentences, this book just didn't click the way I hoped it would. It's a very dense story--in order to give gravity to his narrative, Marra packs a great deal of Chechen history and details that seemed to run on for far too long. The book takes place over a 10-year-period, and switches perspectives frequently and abruptly. And although he weaves all of his storylines together at the end, before that point I wondered why he spent so much time dwelling on certain details about secondary characters.
I'm not usually an outlier in this fashion; I usually like books more than others. So if the story and people's reviews make this book sound like one you think you'd love, have at it. And then perhaps we can discuss what I'm missing.
285 of 307 people found the following review helpful.
A Vitally Phenomenal Debut
By Jill I. Shtulman
Every now and then, a book comes along that restores my faith in the future of the novel all over again. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is such a book.
How can a debut novelist write like this lyrically and searingly? Anthony Marra has "the gift" and his work is more assured than writers who have toiled for years.
I'd like to say I was immediately captured by his novel, but alas, that wouldn't be true. My lack of familiarity with war-torn Chechnya - indeed, with Russian history - distanced me at first. A number of original and whimsical characters were woven into his rich tapestry of words, and for many pages, I wondered just why such-and-such character was being portrayed in great detail.
But then it all started coming together, and - wow oh wow. The title comes from a description of life in a medical book: Life is a constellation of vital phenomena - organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation. A careful reading reveals that for this community of characters, the description is quite apt.
The novel primarily takes place throughout a decade - from 1996 to 2004 - and a line graph at the top of each chapter centers the reader in the timeline. There are three key characters - Akhmed, an incompetent doctor with a good heart...Sonja, a bone-weary surgeon who labors each day at a bombed-out hospital that serves as the only respite for those who have been injured...and Havaa, an eight-year-old girl who has already been forced to endure and lose too much.
Many other secondary characters populate this epic tale, including a beautifully-detailed portrait of a damaged man who has turned informer: Ramzan. All of these characters will become tied in an intricate web of connections that reveal how human fate is not just in our own hands, but in the hands of all humanity.
The result is a haunting and original look into many universal themes. Ramzan says, "We're beyond obligation. We wear clothes and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are." Or is it? Rather than embrace Ramzan's view of the world, this book shines a spotlight on the true meanings of love and sacrifice, and the lengths we will go to connect and endure.
While heartbreaking at times, the book, at its core, is hopeful and proves that an "immense, spinning joy" can occur even when one's very humanity is threatened. I view this Constellation as a potential classic. It is that stellar.
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
Huh
By E. Smiley
This book did not work for me. It's being hailed as a great literary debut, and I don't take issue with the writing style, but the characters and their stories failed to engage me.
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (that's a mouthful!) is set in Chechnya between 1994 and 2004. The main storyline concerns a child (Havaa) being hunted by security forces after her father is disappeared; her neighbor (Akhmed) attempts to rescue her by handing her over to a doctor (Sonja) in a nearby city. This frame story takes place over only five days, but the book also makes extensive use of flashbacks to show how all the characters got to their current situations, as well as jumping ahead (sometimes by decades) to relay what will happen to characters in the future. And there are several secondary characters with whom the book spends quite a bit of time, as well as a plethora of minor ones whose life stories are told in brief asides.
I'm not going to say this is a bad book. Reading about Chechnya and life during wartime was interesting, there's some solid imagery, and the writing is good. Despite the title, it's not overwritten or pretentious, though it is a book that leans more heavily on writing style than plot, and if you're not a fan of long, comma-laden sentences it may not be for you. The beginning and ending are both strong, but for the most part it failed to keep my interest. The characters never came to life for me, whether because too much is simply told or alluded to in flashback rather than shown, or because of the rather flowery and contrived dialogue, or because it jumps around too much in time and among the characters (usually a style I enjoy).
In the end, all the main characters seemed less than the sum of their parts. Akhmed is a nice guy who'd rather be an artist than a doctor, and that's about all there is to him. Havaa is supposed to be 8 years old, but reads more like a mature 13. Sonja.... I don't even know. She's the type of character I'm inclined to love--the brusque, uber-competent female professional--but Marra never got me invested in this particular character. I was actually more interested in her sister Natasha, but the book skims the surface of Natasha's story even faster than it does everyone else's. And basic questions about the plot and the characters' relationships are never satisfactorily answered: for instance, does Sonja know what happened to Natasha the first time she disappeared? Why do Sonja and Akhmed hook up, aside from the fact that the male protagonist and the female protagonist in fiction always do? Why can't the Feds find Havaa simply by following Akhmed or asking around in the city (she seems to do a lot of hanging around public areas of the hospital and socializing with the staff)?
Finally, I would have liked to see more of Chechen culture. There's some great visual detail, but aside from one brief scene dealing with a ritual in the mountains, culturally the book could be set in any war-torn place. Toward the end, a female character isn't searched at a checkpoint because the soldiers take her for "a traditional Chechen woman," which threw me for a loop because in the preceding 340 pages there's no evidence of restraint in the interactions between the sexes, even among the villagers. We know it's a Muslim country because every now and then someone prays. I love to travel the world through fiction, but I want some reassurance that my guide actually knows the place (Marra studied in Russia, but it's unclear to me whether he's ever set foot in Chechnya).
In the end, I may have been a little harsh with this one; it didn't do anything for me, but so many people have loved it that there's a good chance it will work for you. You could do worse than picking up this nicely-written book, which if nothing else will raise your awareness about a little-known part of the world.
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