![]() ![]() There are perhaps too many coincidences to be sustained. During the invasion of Chechnya, Natasha, Sonja’s sister who later goes missing, reads the first published volume of Khassan’s Chechen history. Akhmed spins yarns to his friend’s dying wife. ![]() Marra’s characters keep themselves alive by telling and listening to stories. When the war begins he burns it and starts telling a private story for his offspring in the hope they’ll live in a future where ancient history needn’t be submerged.Īs in Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated,” Khassan, father of the informant, has spent his life writing a million-word history of Chechnya, which has lived in one form of foreign rule or other since the 15th century. Just when you think the book is through introducing people, we meet more.Įveryone is suffering a loss. “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” bulges with side plots and characters. This story would have been enough for a novel, but Marra is not a small-book writer. Both doctors are missing someone, and they latch on to the little girl with the emotional opportunism of the grieving. Trust, in a world riddled by betrayal, develops slowly between Akhmed and Sonja. ![]() The moment Akhmed walks into the hospital with Havaa, the young daughter of his FINGERLESS AND NOW dead neighbor, and presses the girl into Sonja’s care rivals anything Michael Ondaatje has written in its emotional force. “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is densely imagined, and yet cinematic in the after-image. ![]()
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