Finding Substitutions for Loss

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Anthony Marra

Hogarth 2013 (379 pages)

ISBN #978-0-7704-3640-7

  

Finding Substitutions for Loss

by Mark Hummel

A failed doctor, unable to mend the ailing, sketches portraits of refugees fleeing war and paints life-sized painted plywood cutouts of those disappeared from his village. A refugee, conscripted into prostitution and forced heroin addiction, now returned to the place and the war from which she sought refuge, draws the cityscape over a curtained window of buildings now missing or ravaged by bombs. A father, who has lost his fingers in pointless, cruel interrogation, turns to his child to become his hands. Another doctor severs the limbs of landmine victims with the ease of lopping branches from trees, substituting in her efficiency the loss of a disappeared sister and the life of comfort and love she could have had in London. A father saves his voice and his love for the son he has created by love rather than the one created by blood, this now unwanted son who informs on their neighbors. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, the title itself a substitute for the definition of life according to an aged medical text, creates brilliant layers of substitutions of love for a populace slowly being exterminated by hate. Over-arching the entire novel is another substitution—those filling the role of parents and caregivers for others stripped from their families by an illogical and chaotic war—acting out a tale brought down from the Bible and the Koran.

Set inside a layered rendering of the wars and their aftermaths that destroyed Chechnya from 1994 to 2004, Marra takes the reader into terrain—historical, literal, and political—that we should be embarrassed for not knowing. Long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed by countless “best of” lists of 2013 fiction, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a literary debut worth every piece of praise it has garnered. So adroitly does the novel manage complex layers of time and overlapping events, a reader would never imagine this is Anthony Marra’s first novel. Certainly his background demonstrates all the vestiges of America’s literary incubators—a degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford—but one remains shocked at the knowledge Marra demonstrates of the wars that have razed Chechnya or the control he exerts over satisfyingly complex and self-contradictory characters or the maturity of recognition present in this parent story of caring for a variety of displaced orphans. Perhaps most impressive is how beautiful Marra is able to depict images and actions that should be so ugly; instead he salvages beauty from the very language he employs and the precise details he uses. If you are a reader of traditional print books because you are forever writing in the margins, your margins of this book will be filled to overflowing if only marking the moments of breathtaking and exacting prose. Everywhere Marra shows us the dignity and the beauty of people we might otherwise dismiss as inept, or as cold, those we might regard as without meaning or those already destroyed by the cruelty around them. If this is where Anthony Marra starts his career, it is difficult to imagine and wonderful to anticipate the books he will write in his future.

Perfectionism

Okay, so I admit that I'm a bit obsessed with Anthony Marra right now, but there is so much bad writing out there that it is always very exciting to find a talented new writer, to love the work produced, and to anticipate all the great work to come. ...and obviously I'm still reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

There is a passage that I keep coming back to again and again from fairly early in the novel where a historian who has spent his life writing a history of the country he knows best (has in fact written 44,338 pages of the book) is burning his manuscript. It takes him "over twenty trips" to carry the pages into the woods where he has built a fire. At one point Marra tells us:

Khassan was studying the sheet of paper in his hand, where in the fifth sentence of the second paragraph, in the gap of a missing comma, he found the sorrow of his life.

For any of us who try to make our way through the written word, we've known something like Khassan's despair. We strive continuously for perfectionism, only to find the missing commas and the gaps filled with our sorrow.

I'm haunted not just by the despair that drives Khassan to burn his life's work and not just by the laborious pursuit of impossible perfection, but by the stories--the lives--that are also transformed to ashes. Once burned, they are dead forever. They can never exist again, not in another's telling, not in a revised attempt, not in the vegetable matter that will grow from the ashes.

The Power of Detail

Currently I am reading the new novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. This powerful novel is set in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Chechnya and Marra proves a master at conveying the confusing, hopeless, and devastating atmosphere of the post-Soviet satellite. For years I have been trying to teach young writers about the power of detail, or what I always referred to, like my teacher before me--Don Murray--"the revealing specific." Marra clearly understands this power. Here is just a little taste from early in the novel to show what I mean:

The nationalized bus line no longer ran routes into Chechnya, but after she had waited for an hour in a three-person line, a clerk directed her to a kiosk that sold lesbian porn, Ukrainian cigarettes, Air Supply cassettes, and tickets on a privately owned bus that made a weekly journey from North Ossetia to Chechnya.

How's that for a short list that defines a time and place?