The Horrors of Chechnya, With Humor

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/books/a-constellation-of-vital-phenomena-by-anthony-marra.html

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Some good novels catch fire immediately, as if a writer had simply opened a Zippo lighter. Others come into being more gradually. The author cautiously tends to his or her kindling.

Anthony Marra’s first novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” belongs to the second category. It’s a slow burn.

Mr. Marra’s book is set in Chechnya, the disputed Muslim territory in southern Russia that was pushed to the forefront of the world’s consciousness in April after the Boston Marathon attacks. The father of the two brothers considered responsible is an ethnic Chechen.

“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is set against the tangle of wars, occupations and insurgencies that have racked Chechnya since the early 1990s. It hews to the historical record. Among the sources Mr. Marra drew upon, he writes in an afterword, is “A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches From Chechnya” (2003), by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was later murdered.

As such, Mr. Marra’s novel can be sickening reading. Russian forces have frequently abducted and tortured anyone suspected of aiding Chechen separatists, and in “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” there are rapes and beatings. Land mines are triggered. Fingers and testicles are snipped off with bolt cutters during torture sessions. “What did any one person matter,” one character asks, “when pounded against the anvil of history?”

The strange and invigorating thing about Mr. Marra’s novel, however, is how much human warmth and comedy he smuggles, like samizdat, into his busy story. At heart he’s a satirist, a lover not a fighter, a prose writer who resembles the Joseph Heller of “Catch-22” and the Jonathan Safran Foer of “Everything Is Illuminated.”

Mr. Marra’s humor floats most freely in his dialogue, which is both acidic and surreal. If novel writing does not work out for him, he might easily become a world-class playwright.

“Scrap metal and disappearances,” one man intones. “Our national industries.” A girl declares herself a minimalist, for this reason: “It’s a nicer way to say you have nothing.”

A man asks, “Wasn’t it Ronald McDonald who told Gorbachev to tear down the wall?” A woman hears a spoken snippet of a Bee Gees song (“You can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man”) and utters almost wistfully: “For the longest time I thought it was from the Koran.” Many of my favorite lines aren’t publishable here.

I’ve put off summarizing the plot of “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” — the title comes from a dictionary’s definition of life — because it’s grim labor to do so. This is a novel, like so many, that crosscuts among multiple stories and characters and toggles back and forth in time.

This strategy, a form of dividing and conquering if not drawing and quartering, can deliver great works of beauty — witness David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” (2004). But it can also stymie and confound.

In “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” Mr. Marra introduces us to exuberant characters, only to shuffle them into the wings for chapters at a time. Tension is rarely allowed to build. The grease of human existence is kept from plausibly accumulating. I disliked the sensation that I was reading a feat of editing as much as a feat of writing. I admired this novel more than I warmed to it.

The book is partly the story of a young girl, Havaa, whose father is abducted and killed by Russian soldiers. She comes to live at a mostly abandoned hospital which a steely doctor, Sonja, almost single-handedly keeps running. The man who brings Havaa to the hospital, Akhmed, begins to work there too, despite the fact that he is “the most incompetent doctor in Chechnya, the single least distinguished physician to ever graduate Volchansk State University Medical School.”

This hospital setting leads to many organic bits of grim medical humor. Morphine is not available, so patients are mollified with heroin. Dental floss is sometimes employed for surgical stitches. While helping to amputate a patient’s leg, Akhmed observes: “I didn’t know human bone marrow is red. I thought it would be golden. Like a cow’s.”

Sonja replies: “If we were to shake a little salt and pepper on this bone and roast it in the oven, the marrow would turn golden in about 15 minutes.” About Akhmed, we read, “He feared he might vomit.”

Other major characters cycle through this narrative: informers, historians, artists, fathers, sisters. Mr. Marra is a lovely writer about families. He offers what might be the best definition of what one sister means to another that I have ever read: “She wouldn’t cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.”

He is, in fact, a lovely writer about many things. Young Russian soldiers are “all fear and peach fuzz.” A majority of a woman’s dance moves “consisted of attempts to stay upright.” He delivers stray, J. G. Ballard-like visions, like a Mercedes that can be driven only in tight circles on a tennis court because there are no uncratered roads.

He catches the quotidian horrors of late-night knocks on the door and checkpoints on the highways. One man, smuggling weapons for the Chechen resistance, thinks to himself as Russian soldiers search his car: “A few more seconds and they would find the Makarov handguns, fragmentation grenades, Semtex bricks and lead wires, and he would die here, flopping like a goddamn sea mammal, many kilometers from home.”

The stories in this novel move together and apart, and are filled with an awareness of Chechnya’s “density of loss.” It’s a blasted society where happiness can best be expressed as “an absence — of fear, of pain, of grief.”

Mr. Marra was inspired to write “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” he has said, after realizing that there was no English-language literary novel about the Chechen conflict. Though he was born in Washington, D.C., he has lived in Eastern Europe and has studied Chechen literary and political history.

He has made a mighty effort. I found his novel to be cloying at times, as Mr. Foer’s fiction can sometimes be. I was rarely persuaded that I was plunging deeply into Muslim consciousness. There is little religious awareness here.

But “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” is ambitious and intellectually restless. It’s humane and absurd, and rarely out of touch with the Joseph-Heller-like notion that, as Mr. Marra puts it, “stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.”