A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra (2013)

I'm trying to think of an adjective to describe this novel. In my review in March of Anthony Marra's second book, The Tsar of Love and Techno, I used the adjective "incredible." A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is Marra's first book, and it is even better than his second. What is beyond incredible? This book is so good that words fail me.

The setting is war-torn Cechnya; the timeline is 1994-2004, during which the country fought two wars with post-Soviet Russia; the characters are ordinary apolitical people who struggle, often unsuccessfully, to survive under the worst of circumstances. Despite the abundance of horrific happenings, the tone is optimistic, because Marra illustrates that even deeply flawed human beings can rise to heroism when spurred on by love and family connections. Above all is the concept that life struggles to overcome all obstacles; the title of the book comes from a medical textbook which describes life as "a constellation of vital phenomena--organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation." The key word for the characters here is "adaptation." They do what they have to do.

The action skips backwards and forwards in time but centers around 5 days, beginning when Akhmed, Chechnya's worst doctor, rescues the child Havaa when her father is "disappeared" by Russian soldiers. He takes her for hiding and sanctuary to Sonja, Chechnya's best doctor, the only one left to staff the hospital in the nearby town.

I am impressed by Marra's empathy for his characters, so that even the villain, the informer, is granted some measure of sympathy. As in the real world, few people are entirely praiseworthy or entirely bad. I am also impressed by his depictions of political torture, if you can use that term for something that is very disturbing to read. He clearly indicates that the process of torture dehumanizes not only the sufferer but also the torturer.

It is impossible to read a book like this about how armed conflict affects the civilian population of a region, when they are as likely to be killed by either side, without current events coming to mind, especially the situation in Syria. How callous must a country be to deny the innocent victims an escape. Tim O'Brien in his novel The Things They Carried said that "story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth." My definition of a great novel is one that tells a good story in an engaging style, while at the same time teaching a universal truth, applicable to any time, any place. This is a great novel. I guess that's the adjective I was searching for.