A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Novel

By: Anthony Marra

Narrated by: Colette Whitaker

Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2013 Anthony Marra (P)2013 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“ A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular. Not since Everything is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized. If this is where Anthony Marra begins his career, I can't imagine how far he will go.”
—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto

“Remarkable and breathtaking, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a spellbinding elegy for an overlooked land engulfed by an oft forgotten war. Set in the all-too-real Chechen conflict, Marra conjures fragile and heartfelt characters whose fates interrogate the very underpinnings of love and sacrifice.”
—Adam Johnson , Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son

“A complex debut…[Marra writes] with elegant details about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[An] extraordinary first novel...Marra collapses time, sliding between 1996 and 2004 while also detailing events in a future yet to arrive, giving his searing novel an eerie, prophetic aura. All of the characters are closely tied together in ways that Marra takes his time revealing, even as he beautifully renders the way we long to connect and the lengths we will go to endure.” —Booklist (starred review)

Emotional story of Cheytena

Excellent, even though a bit contrived at times, of the life of the common, unmentioned people of a worn torn country. Important read to help one understand that people in lands we don't know feel and care and want the same things we do.

Not one of my favorites

I felt intimidated by this novel because I did not know anything at all about Chechnya or the wars and the title seemed science fiction-y to me (it’s not at all). The characters are well developed and I enjoyed the story, but I found the amount of connection he tried to make with totally random people / events overwhelming and unnecessary. The horrors of modern day war and a lawless, war torn country came alive in through his descriptive writing, but I had a hard time following the timeline because it used both flashbacks and flash forwards to tell the story.

Humane and heartbreaking

The writing is beautiful, the story crafted and assembled brilliantly; this is a work full of humanity, and utterly heartbreaking. A stunning work of art.

Excellent book!

Excellent book - well written, well developed characters, plot, historical and physical setting. I learned about a part of the world I had never considered before and was reminded of the extensive collateral damage of war.

Good potential

There is a lot of good material in the story, some great. What should be the start of the book is buried later in the book, and it takes a while to get hooked. The performance suffers from a reading with what the performer takes to be Chechien and Russian accents. This creates a barrier to listening. Presumably they are not speaking their own language with an accent. Literature in translation should not be read with an accent that a person might have speaking English. War and Peace characters, for example, are not read with Russian accents. This would only make it more difficult for people to understand.

Beautiful story

Love the poetic language used throughout. Wonderful story and helped me learn a lot about the area

A forgotten war brought to life

The story was beautifully written. The subject matter, the Chechnya wars, was rarely spoken of in the western press. It should have been. The more we know of wars, the more we will work to avoid them, to find peace. The characters are well developed, the story is unfiltered, raw, and sad. It shows cruelty, fear, resilience, and the healing nature of time.

Recovery Rather Than Destruction

The title of this novel, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" was borrowed from a Russian Medical Dictionary; it was the definition listed under the entry for the word "Life". The definition strikes me as inexplicably lyrical and poetic; making it a fitting title to this impressive work.

Marra's book is all about life; not just the lives of the main characters we follow throughout the book, but also of a full constellation of lives that orbit them. The lives of an embittered nurse, once jilted by an oncologist. A six year old in Manchester, England, who desperately wanted to avoid another hand-me-down. A neighbor; an elderly woman who believes she gets daily visitations from "ghosts, angels, prophets and monsters". A swarthy, opportunist smuggler who does good deeds for the doctor who saved her brother's life - explaining that even though the brother in question was most definitely his least favorite of six brothers, had remembered to feed his pet turtle once as a child; so a favor was still owed for his life. From these characters and countless more, the constellation is formed.

The last word of the title, phenomena, is defined as "a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen". And with that, the story takes form; as we learn how the full constellation of characters came to either be where they are, or end up where they will, based on the vital facts and situations of their lives.

Other reviewers have discussed that the story was depressing, the torture brutal, the characters sad. They definitely have very valid points; but I somehow didn't find the book too depressing. I was struck by the flashes of normalcy despite the terrible circumstances, the unexpected humor, and the strong underlying current of innate goodness and dignity that ran through the main characters we followed.

In an interview, the author Anthony Marra shared, "I knew early on that though the novel was set against a backdrop of war, it would be a book about recovery rather than destruction, about surgeons rather than soldiers." That is the feeling the story left me with.

Gorgeous, heartbreaking and confusing.

First the gorgeous: There are some phrases and sentences in this book that are so impeccably written that I had to stop and listen to them again. Marra's writing skills are absolutely first rate. The complexity of the relationships and the way he foreshadows events is artfully done. It's brilliant, really. There's nothing about this that feels like a first book. It's really beautifully crafted.

The heartbreaking: It's impossible to put a child in the midst of a brutal war and have anything but heartbreak. But it goes beyond that. There just isn't a part of this story that doesn't have an element of profound loss. I didn't find any of it uplifting as others have mentioned in reviews.

And now about the confusing part: I had a terrible time keeping up with the changes in time. The complexity of the relationships is difficult to track in and of itself. I listened twice simply because I missed too much the first time. I am a hardcore book listener and rarely do I think a book would be better in print - but this is that rare exception. I needed to be able to flip between pages sometimes and I couldn't.

Now the narration ... I won't call it awful, but it is so uninspired. This book deserved something better than that. It's competent, but adds nothing to the experience and may even make it more difficult to track.

Hard story to listen to

I really knew nothing about what happened then - even though it was difficult to listen about all the terrible things that happened it was a very interesting and well written story. One I won't forget easily.