Here I go again, bringing a book everywhere. Restaurants, rest stops, long walks, a book comes with me wherever I go.
Even books that are incredibly, impossibly upsetting.
I picked up A Constellation of Vital Phenomena when we were in the US this past spring and I was sort of waiting to take it on vacation because it seemed like the kind of book I could get lost in. It’s certainly that and more and I would recommend it as vacation reading as long as you aren’t on your honeymoon or any other strictly romantic getaway.
The novel takes place mostly in a bloody town in worn-torn Chechnya. Havaa, an eight-year-old girl, has just escaped from the Feds after they took her father to an almost certain death. She is taken under her neighbor’s wing and sent to the hospital to escape the Feds who want to finish the job and assure her silence. Hers is a bleak and hopeless future.
At the hospital Havaa mets Sonja, a relentless doctor who has rough calluses on her hands from countless amputations and is committed to keeping her scrubs a sparkling white. She’s lost her sister’s whereabouts and subsists mainly on amphetamines and adrenaline. Her future looks similarly bleak.
Indeed, the entire novel is discouraging and depressing in its descriptions of unspeakable torture and violence (a warning: there is a section about two-thirds of the way through that was truly unreadable for me). War’s ability to transform men and neighbors into faceless monsters is on full display. One can’t help but feel disgusted by what we are capable of.
But, Anthony Marra’s beautiful, extraordinary language is compelling and one can’t help but marvel at his deft hand. As Meg Wollitzer writes for NPR, the “brilliant writing…kept me committed to that world and the people in it. In fact, the people also kept me there. The main characters are vivid and real and stuck, and I guess I wanted to be stuck along with them.”
We care about Havaa and her father; we care about Akhmed and his dying wife; we care about Sonja and her missing sister; we care about all the nameless people that flow through the hospital and the streets, both in the novel and in our all-too-true lives. Marra’s writing makes clear what is all too evident in our more tenuous corners of the globe. He brings humanity to a scene that is woefully lacking any. While his timeline mainly stays between 1994 and 2004, the narrative at times swings wildly between flashbacks and flash forwards, dutifully ignoring linear progress much like war does. His blend of sincerity, humor, and the grotesque are simultaneously respectful and informative, making for a mesmerizing read.
I recently purchased All the Light We Cannot See but I’m going to wait a little bit before reading that. I can only handle so many war novels in a row. But, I’m curious to know if you’ve read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena or something similar: a book that makes you squirm with discomfort and cry with sympathy. Reading this novel was an incredibly moving experience.
A Broad At Home 