A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Novel

By: Anthony Marra

Narrated by: Colette Whitaker

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)

Read it to Know this Quote

I didn't love this book like everyone else did, but I do feel like I should have. I'm just not as big on the big interlocking short story book (meaning that this was a series of stories about the lives of the characters in this book, not pulling together the way they do in a big epic, but rather connected the way stars are, because we see the connection, we see the pattern even if it is random), and that is what this felt like to me. But I did love some of the thoughts that were universal, and not just applicable in war torn Chechnya, especially this one as it applies to the way we humans interweave and support each other or not: “Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.” I am also glad I learned more about that conflict.

One of the best books I've ever read

I'm in love with this book! Marra is a top-notch story teller. I loved the way that the story jumped from different character perspectives throughout the decade-long story. Every sentence, every word was thoughtfully and beautifully constructed. The story is so sad and overwhelming and heartwarming and heart-wrenching all at the same time. A MUST READ! Im anxiously waiting for Marra's next book.

Vivid View

There seem to be no minor characters on this novel. Though a man may appear just once we learn his past and future. These many futures help us overlook the losses and grief of the present. The characters lives are interwoven in ways that seem strange to those withcars and freeways and serve as a warning that little is as it seems on the surface.

Mastery of images and characters

Marra weaves images into scenes, making a faraway land familiar. War does not make for a feel good story, but he methodically quantifies the lives of the characters and reveals their complicated value in start contrast to the negative sum game of the historical setting.

An Extraordinary Book

The story, the character development, just everything about this is richly conceived and beautifully meticulous. Be prepared for a powerful journey.

A Constellation of Beautiful Words

This is a beautifully written and narrated book. Unlike anything I've ever read or heard of. It follows the extraordinary and tragic lives of characters who are intertwined like the constellations in the night sky. There are some gruesome descriptions of tortures that took place, but it wasn't bad enough to make me stop listening. This book will stay with me forever, and I see myself rereading it several times.

One of 3 best books of the last 5 years.

brilliant, captivating, perceptive, intelligent and incedibly moving. Both intellectually and emotionally challenging. a must read.

A Conflicted Response

This is one of the most difficult reviews that I can remember writing. I am extremely conflicted about Anthony Marra's debut novel. My head pulls me in one direction, but my gut pulls me in another: which way should I go? and where should I start?

There are many gushing reviews here already, and most of them repeat the plot outline and character descriptions. I will avoid those routes as much as possible; read elsewhere if that is what you seek.

Let's start with the points of conflict.

1) Marra's prose is stunningly beautiful. Marra's prose is too stunningly beautiful.

How can that be? Well, at many points in the novel, I simply got lost in it, more caught up in the turn of phrase, the image, the way a sentence seemed to meander on forever, leaving me with a sense of anticipation, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . for that exquisite final . . . what, exactly? The end of the sentence? And where were we, and what was happening to . . which character was that again? In other words, while, overall, I greatly admire Marra's mastery of language and can point to a number of exquisite and even perfect passages, I sometimes felt that style conquered substance. I'm well aware that this opinion deviates from the popular one, but there it is. A few readers have complained that the book is unnecessarily long, mainly due to lengthy 'poetic' descriptions, and I'm leaning towards agreement with them.

2) The events in the book and the connections among the characters are believable. Most of the events in the book are believable, but there are way too many extraordinary coincidences.

The horrors of the Chechnyan wars, the killings, the torture, the missing, the betrayals of friends and family members are, as depicted, all too real. Marra gives us the worst of human nature and the lengths to which we will go to preserve our own lives. And he also gives us moments of hope, generosity, and selflessness--the other side of the coin. But the coincidences seemed stretched. For example: The missing sister of Sonja, the female Russian doctor, just happens to have been the nurse who eight years earlier delivered the infant Havaa, the girl now brought to Sonja by Ahkmed, the Chechan doctor who just started working for her, who happened to be at the birth with his friend Dokka, the new father, who also happened several years later to shelter this same nurse in his home when she was a refugee . . . I know the population was cut down significantly in a decade of wars, but I just didn't buy this, or several other similar circumstances.

3) The characterizations were brilliant.

No argument here. Even the most reprehensible characters, such as Ramzan the informer, were thoroughly and believably developed in such a way that I had to empathize with their motives, even when I did not agree with them. I loved Ahkmed, the character whose loyalties were the most divided but at the same time the most clear, and Khassan, the aged historian who loved, pitied, and hated his son and struggled every minute to determine the moral right. Even the minor characters were unique individuals, carefully drawn and memorable.

4) The book taught me a lot that I didn't know about the Chechan wars. The book really didn't teach me anything about the Chechan wars.

War is hell. The Chechan wars were hell. I still don't have a really clear idea of what caused them or the ideology of the opposing sides.

That's probably enough to draw this to a conclusion. Overall, I enjoyed the book (although "enjoyed" seems like the wrong word for a novel in which there is so much suffering; maybe I should say that I admired it or was completely engrossed with it). There were, however, several rather long stretches that seemed to drag on forever. It took me quite awhile to finish the book, but the last third or so went really fast. I'm giving it a 4-star rating--which is open to change upon reflection, but I feel pretty sure that it will stand. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena certainly gets my recommendation, and I look forward to Marra's next effort.

On the reader: I thought she did a good job. Some reviewers complained that her voice was too monotone, but I did not find this to be the case. She has the right tone for a story that is, after all, mostly serious, and she did well with the various accents.

Powerful

This is a powerful book, sometimes disturbing, sometimes hopeful. As the two doctors, Sonja and Akhmed, save Havaa, a young girl caught in the horrors of the Chechnyan wars after her father is abducted, we learn to love and hate the characters around her, while also recognizing that they are all caught in their own nightmares. The characters are complex and none of them is always what we expect, thus making the book continually interesting to read, not always to know what comes next (although that's important too) but also to learn what came before.

Marra uses foreshadowing to help reassure us that some characters will actually outlive the horror, thus making the unspeakable realities of the war somewhat easier to read. Nevertheless, the descriptions of what takes place at "the Landfill" are horrific and disturbing. How can people treat each other this way? Can this be real? How do people face such horror and live? What is life?

But live, they do, and interact. They eat and play and make love and survive. They build on their past and build towards a future. In the end, there is triumph and we are reminded that Life--a constellation of vital pheonomena--carries for all of us happiness and sadness, birth and death.

Slow build

I ended up liking this book but it took well over halfway to make me care. I appreciate clever writing but it took too long to make it he connections between the characters. I will say that I cried at the end so it was successful.
The narrator's voice was too soothing. Listening in the car, I often tuned out because her voice was one note. I'm sure that didn't help with taking so long to engage. Maybe reading would have been better for this book.