“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.” (184) A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2014) by Anthony Marra follows a number of characters living in a small, mountain village of Chechnya from 1994 through 2004. The story jumps around between characters and time, sometimes even up to the 1940’s to show an older character’s earlier life. Although it’s not difficult to follow, the […]
You should read this novel about Chechnya.
This is a superb book. “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” has a main storyline: In a tiny village in Chechnya in 2004, Akhmed, an incompetent doctor, takes his neighbor Dokka’s daughter, Havaa, in search of safety after her father has been disappeared and their house burned down. They walk to the hospital, where a tough woman named Sonja is the head surgeon–and one one of two employees. Sonja has enough to worry about without taking on the care of an 8-year old girl, and when she’s not amputating limbs, she’s […]