Nearly every Best-of-2013 book list I've read included Anthony Marra's debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, and I'm so pleased to see this engaging and wise book receive the credit it so richly deserves. The story takes place during the two Chechen Wars, between 1994 and 2004, and revolves around a pair of doctors who protect a young girl who lost her only parent in the war. Though the subject matter might not have initially drawn me to the novel, I had heard so many good reports about it that I gave it a chance anyway and was hooked almost immediately.
Marra is an excellent storyteller: the plot unwinds non-sequentially, with the author deftly moving the time setting backward and forward to control how events and characters are revealed. But two other factors impressed me even more than the intricately worked plot. First, the description of the time and place are so vivid and filled with detail that it's almost impossible to understand how Marra could have captured it as an outsider. Apparently he studied abroad in Russia in college and did visit Chechnya at some point, but this book feels like it was written by someone who lived through the story. His research must have been tremendous because the details were practically tactile they were so specific and full of life. After finishing the book, I felt like I had visited Chechnya. That couldn't have been easy, but he made it seem natural. Bravo.
The second aspect of the book that I found remarkable was the sheer quality of writing and the truth of his observations. Sometimes as a reader I'm tempted to speed through passages that don't seem to move the plot forward, but doing so with this novel would rob it of some of its most insightful and poignant moments. This is a novel to soak up, not speed through. Here are some passages that help explain what I mean:
In describing a doting mother/daughter relationship: "Her mother treated her with the pride and envy of a woman who had fallen in love with sixteen boys in secondary school, none of whom reciprocated her affection."
The family dynamics between the favored daughter above (Natasha) and her brainy and less approachable sister Sonja: "Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn't need MDs to know how to be proud of her."
Or how about this sentence: "This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space."
"Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn't, and the appendices couldn't explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment. Only one entry supplied an adequate definition, and she circled it with red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena--organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation."
A young girl, on learning of the loss of her parent: "The look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was."
I almost never re-read novels, but this one was so rich and layered that I'm tempted to open it up again to see what I would draw from a second pass through it. This is a rare, special book, and it was the perfect way to close a year of outstanding books in 2013.
