The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra (2015)

This collection of nine short stories which reads like a novel is incredible, just incredible. Anthony Marra displays some of the same literary mannerisms as his fellow MFA/Iowa Writers' Workshop contemporaries, but he does it better than the others I have read. I consider this the most well done 2015 book I have read as I have endeavored to read the best of last year.

The Tsar of Love and Techno feels like a novel because all the stories are connected by reappearing characters and objects. The central character is the first story, Roman Markin is a censor in 1937 in the USSR, charged with obliterating dissidents from photos and paintings. One of the paintings he alters, a landscape of a pastoral scene, reappears in stories 2, 3, 5, and 8. Roman Markin's nephew and grand-nephew reappear in stories 7 and 8. One of the photographs Markin alters features a famous ballerina, whose granddaughter Galina is included in stories 2, 3, and 5, with passing mentions in other stories. Galina's teenage sweetheart is included in stories 2, 4, and 6. And so it goes, with examples of connections too numerous to catalog. The time and place for the stories skips around from 1937 to the unnamed future in Siberia, Chechnya, and St. Petersburg, portraying the changing political climate and its effect on the many characters.

Marra also unifies the stories by a persistence of themes and motifs, particularly concerning the preservation of memory through pictorial evidence and the responses of individuals to a harsh and repressive environment. One of the characters says, "No one was innocent, no one was unconnected, no one was not complicit."

Marra is a master in his combining of pathos with a sardonic and bleak humor. He has ingeniously kept the stories from sounding too clever for their own good by assigning his many quotable one-liners to first-person narrators, so that they appear to be natural to the characters as they are portrayed rather than being show-off quips from the writer.

This was an ALA Notable Book and is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. If I were a Pulitzer judge, this is the book I would pick for the fiction prize.