Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel
Unavailable
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel
Unavailable
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel
Audiobook12 hours

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel

Written by Anthony Marra

Narrated by Colette Whitaker

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A National Book Awards Longlist Selection

A New York Times and Washington Post bestseller

A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

 
Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. "On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones." Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. Though Sonja protests that her hospital is not an orphanage, Akhmed convinces her to keep Havaa for a trial, and over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 7, 2013
ISBN9780385363563
Unavailable
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel

Related to A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Related audiobooks

War & Military Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Rating: 4.283267299604743 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

759 ratings114 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I don't often stop halfway through a book, but I couldn't go any further with this. The narration was SO slow and the constant moving back and forth between time periods was exhausting. I kept hoping the book would improve, but it never did and in the end I just didn't care.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" isn't a bad book. It feels well-researched, and readers interested in 20th- and 21st century Russia may find lots to like here. Marra also does some interesting with plot, providing brief yet satisfying glimpses of how the book's bit players will end up after all the wars have wound up. His prose isn't much better than average, though he shows the odd poetic flourish, which, given the book's relentlessly subject matter, is certainly welcome. The book's strongest suit, however, is also it's problem: Marra's characters are likable, realistic and well-formed. But when one considers the fact that this novel explicitly details a society-wide collapse and a human tragedy that lasted years, I began to suspect that the individuals that find themselves at the center of this disaster shouldn't matter to me as much as they did. It's a bit like James Cameron's "Titanic," which asks viewers to care about the fate of Jack and Rose after showing all of the ship's steerage passengers get locked behind steel gates just as the ship begins to go down. Sonja, the talented, dedicated, and emotionally distant Russian surgeon, Natasha, her troubled younger sister, and Akhmed, the barely competent country doctor, are all affecting characters, but after having witnessed so much death, their interactions started to feel a bit like melodrama. When the setting is literally littered with corpses, should it matter to the reader how these end up?Well, maybe it does. "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" is literature, not history, and the small, human stuff does matter, or at least it should. There are lots of great novels that work both at the personal and at the world-historical level. But I get the feeling that Marra doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off, or at least not yet. And his descriptions of destroyed, desolate postwar Grozny and of the bizarre ways that Chechen society was transformed in wartime suggest that a great book might come out of that conflict yet. Maybe one already has. But I felt that this book moves slower than it has to, and some parts of it are more conventional than they need to be. Considering the events that surrounded the book's characters, perhaps I wanted something more radical, something that would mirror the wholesale destruction that visited this place during these years. "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" wasn't really it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that other readers won't like it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is probably a really good novel, but I read it at a time when I just couldn't concentrate on Chechnya. I don't have enough history to the country to give it justice. At times the author fills in, but at other times, the reader is expected to understand the background of what is happening.Basically, it is a story of a man who was last in his class at medical school (he really wanted to be an artist), who finds himself working along side a lone woman surgeon in a remote hospital. There are rebels and Russians, soldiers and spies, fathers and daughters.May give it another try at a different time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm stunned. This book is beautifully written, evocative, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Marra deftly weaves the threads of the characters lives together in ways that are unexpected, but compelling. This is one of, if not the best novel I have read this year and I cannot recommend it enough. Be prepared for tears. This is a book that will stay with me for a very long time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Anthony Marra is an artistic writer. The characters are flawed and heroic. I was amazed at how the story unfolded and the links connected. Amazing novel!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of those books where the writing is so beautiful, I feel like the writing in my review will be inadequate to describe it. If I could tell you exactly how the author achieved the effects he did, I'd be a best-selling author myself. Instead, I can only give you my impressions. The writing was very concise but every word the author used seemed meaningful and carefully chosen. The author often repurposed common words and phrases to give them fresh meanings which made me think about the world in new ways. The author also juxtaposed the poignantly sorrowful and upliftingly hopeful in a way that made my heart ache. If I haven't convinced you to pick this up, I hope you'll at least check out the many other rave reviews in hopes they'll convince you instead.

    This review first published at Doing Dewey.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Marra provides readers with a stunning portrayal of Chechnya in the years following the fall of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the lives of five Chechen individuals, Marra’s shifting narration and timelines made this one a bit challenging to follow in audiobook format. By the middle of the book, I had a better grasp of where Marra was going with the story and was able to settle in and just follow along. Against the backdrop of the devastation and human tragedy of the war torn region, Marra brings forth that gem that we all carry deep inside ourselves: How our ingrained desires for hope, compassion, dignity and love can survive as a beacon of light to carry us through even the most devastating of situations and conditions.Favorite quote: "At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure by a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't generally respond positively to stories set in wartime. They're cold, and dark, and bad things happen to good people. I don't enjoy any of that.

    But, for a book of that genre, this was a cut above average. The Chechnyan backdrop was unusual and interesting, and the mixed-up morality of wartime was well-portrayed. (If you obtain critical medicine for a family member by informing on a neighbor, are you a hero or a villain?)

    Something about the snow and woods and Eastern European setting reminded me strongly of Child 44, but I quit that book a quarter of the way through, and I finished this one, so this one must be better. The odd thing, though, is that I had a hard time holding the story in my head when I was away from it; if you'd asked me what if been reading lately, I'd have blinked at you and wondered why I couldn't remember. But once I had no trouble picking up the thread of the story again once the book was back in my hands, so I'm not sure if the unmemorable nature of my reading was due to my own oddity or the book's.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For a young American writer to choose Chechnya as the subject for a first novel shows commendable ambition, and for the most part he gets away with it. I had high expectations of this book after seeing a few recommendations from friends here. I do have some reservations. When dealing with such unpleasant subject matter, the tone must be a tricky balancing act, particularly given the amount of humour that pervades it. I found the frequent asides about the futures of the surviving characters rather irritating, and I think it does try to squeeze too many elements and too much research in to be entirely convincing, and there is quite a lot of writerly trickery. For all that, there is a powerful human story at the centre of the book and it manages to maintain a degree of hope, and the narrative is never less than readable. A very promising debut.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, just wow. This book - beautifully written - is so full of depth and power that it's hard to adequately express my feelings about it. The characters, complex and vividly drawn, are unforgettable. The moments of creativity and love in the midst of unspeakable horror remind me why we live. What does one read after a book like this?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful writing! Absolutely. Like someone below said, so many quotes were my favourite until I came to the next one!This is the story of the war in Chechnya, which I'd heard of but didn't know much about. It tells about how people coped with the awful realities around them -- some by heroic deeds, some by finding meaning in saving one important thing, others by turning on each other. It's a hard story to read because of the brutality and tragedy, yet the author manages to bring some humour and some hope into the lives of his characters. The omniscient narrator is a form that has become less popular, but it is really well employed here. I liked learning of the back-stories and the author even flashes forward to what happens, years after the novel's end, to some of the characters in a way that really enhances the poignancy of the story. I did feel, however, that while I knew a lot about what the characters did, I knew less about their thoughts -- which left lots of space for discussion among my book club members!I want to read more by this author.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a tough book to read! It was more than I ever wanted to know about Chechnya, but a book which was rewarding in that it taught me about this republic which has been dominated by Russians who oppressed and tortured its people. Although this book is a novel, it led me to learn more about Chechnya as I was reading the story. It is a gruesome read about three friends, Dokka, Akhmed, and Ramzan whose friendship turned sour as a result of two wars. It is also about two sisters, Sonja (a brilliant doctor) and Natasha (the more beautiful woman four years her sister's junior), who have to decide whether or not to stay in Chechnya. I guess in times of hatred, war, divisiveness, torture, and fear, one has to look for anything good at all. There is some deep good in this book...the need to protect Havaa, a young girl whose father Dokka was taken twice to the "Landfill", a place of torture and disappearance. At first, I wasn't sure that I could make it all the way through this book because each chapter took place in a different year or years. The years skipped all over the place. The reason for this confused relationship of years to each other was to hint at and finally reveal the story of all the characters and how they related to each other in a compelling way. The writing was extraordinary. At the last sentence of this book, all I could utter was, Oh, my God!".
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Against an apocalyptic landscape backdrops war-torn by the Chechen Wars between 1994 and 2004, this literary novel provides the poignant interrelated lives of five characters: Akhmed, a neighbor, who rescues a friend's 8-year-old daughter, Havaa, after Russian troops seize her father; Sonya, an ethnic Russian, the only doctor in a nearby hospital who receives Havaa; Natasha, Sonya's younger heroin-addicted sister, who disappears from her apartment she shares with Sonya in an attempt to escape her personal hell; Ramzan, former Muslim arms smuggler turned Russian informer, shunned by his neighbors; and Khassan, Ramzan's father, WWII sharpshooter, who is trying to reconcile with son.

    Although Marra's debut novel is not a "feel good novel", it is beautifully written. The characters are so well developed that you easily touched their attempts to survive in a world disrupted by a decade of war and to find what little joys they can eke out of their Spartan existence. I believe that Anthony Marra will join the literary giants with this and future works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A very sad and insightful look into the history of a war-torn Chechnya. The characters struggle to survive in the aftermath of many deaths and losses. They somehow manage to find faith, compassion, and the will to survive. Quote from the book that sums up the title: "Life: A constellation of vital phenomena- organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction and adaptation. Not an easy read, but worth it!! The end had me teary-eyed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A tragic story, beautifully told.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Master storyteller. Truly enjoyed the story. Got me all teary at the end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Well written but very very long. I listenened to in sections. Good character development and effective interweaving of stories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A harrowing story of people dealing with the war, terror, and the collapse of civilization. A few bright spots are swamped by a sea of miseries. The character studies are very well done.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
     This was a re-read for me, which I rarely do. I first read the book in 2016 and remembered it as one of the best books I had ever read. I'll admit that when I cracked it open this time around, I didn't really remember the story but was immediately engrossed in it again. After reading it again, it remains one of my favorites and I will definitely continue recommending it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Let me first write that this was an excellent book. Then let me write that it was one of the hardest books I've read in a while. Not for the writing style but rather for the subject matter. The writing style had me reading this book in one day. Some of the scenes were very difficult to read and while the book is fiction some of the aspects are based in reality and I'll forever be appalled at what one man can do to another.I can't possibly recount the well derived plot any better than the synopsis provide above. Just know that the main story takes place over 5 short days with backstory encompassing 8 years and in reality a conflict of thousands of years.Mr. Marra's narrative draws you in from the very first page with a horror of war and keeps you turning the pages to follow the connections between the citizens of a small village, a London trained doctor and little Havaa, the focal point around whom all the points turn. For it is saving the life of this child that sets the whole plot in motion and only as the story unfolds do we understand just how connected we all can be.The story is told in the present, the past with sprinklings of the future that make it a fascinating experience for the reader. You don't know from section to section what you might learn to help bring the story to its conclusion and all the pieces are necessary for complete understanding. This is a book that requires attention but your attention is well rewarded. I am keeping it for a second read as I expect I shall appreciate it even more on the second pass.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Late one snowy night, eight-year-old Havaa’s father, Dokka, is violently taken from their home in a small village in Chechnya as she watches from a hiding place in the woods. Also watching is their neighbor and family friend, Akhmed. Knowing that Dokka has been abducted by the Feds for aiding Chechen rebels and that his daughter is not safe, Akhmed rescues Havaa and takes her to a nearly abandoned hospital in the nearest city, where he hopes the only remaining doctor, Sonja, will allow them refuge.The overburdened surgeon reluctantly allows them to stay in the partially bombed hospital, partly due to Akhmed’s false claims of being a skilled doctor. In addition to the strain of running a hospital in a war-torn country on her own, Sonja is struggling with the disappearance of her sister, Natasha, a year before.Meanwhile, Khassan, an elderly pariah who spends his days with a pack of wild dogs, is distressed by the actions of his son, Ramzan, who is the informer whose betrayal led to Dokka’s abduction.A Constellation of Vital Phenomena spans from 1994 to 2004, encompasses two wars, and weaves together the stories of its six main characters, revealing surprising connections between them.This is a very complex story, and the fragmentation of Marra’s non-linear storytelling sometimes made me confused about where I was in the plot, especially because I don’t really know anything about Chechen history. The concept of weaving these stories together in the context of Chechnya’s wars was very ambitions, and despite my occasional confusion, I think Marra pulled it off really well. The characters’ stories are so intricate, and it was amazing to see the pieces of this story fall into place and fit perfectly together like pieces of a puzzle.Each character is well developed, and Marra does an excellent job of portraying their multiple dimensions. For example, although we first see Ramzan as a horrible, untrustworthy character who is ready to inform on any villager who crosses him, the reader eventually sees how he came to be that way and must feel sympathy for him. I loved seeing the characters’ histories and relationships unfold as Marra unveiled more and more of their pasts.Additionally, the writing is rich and beautiful, and I loved basking in Marra’s sentences.“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”As I’ve already mentioned, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a very complex novel, and I definitely plan to re-read it so that I can more fully grasp the connections and straighten out the order of events in my head. I thought this was an excellent, compassionate book about the strength of love in the face of war and the meaning of family. This is an impressive debut novel, and I greatly look forward to reading anything Anthony Marra writes in the future.I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In 2004 I went to two lectures: one by Michael Moore and one by Chomsky. Although Chomsky was aware and brought further awareness to the Chechen war, it was clear that his attention was drawn to US politics . At the Michael Moore lecture it seemed he was completely unaware of the war and it was a fellow audience member who spoke passionately about this dreadful , unbelievably cruel war... to which Michael Moore responded in appalling bad taste : with a joke.
    It has never left me : the attempt at joking about war and the focus on 1 st world problems against the cruelty of this war.

    So this is a book I sought out - and it is wonderful: the sweetness of human dignity, the understated humbleness. The horrors of war
    Exceptional writing!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I was a senior in high school, I was friends with an exchange student, a Russian from Uzbekistan. When the school year ended, she went back to Uzbekistan, and I went to college in the Midwest. In the letters we exchanged, she encouraged me in my study of the Russian language, and at her urging, I wrote back in unsteady Cyrillic, sure I sounded like a child. In the letters she sent shortly before she moved to Moscow, she described what life was like for her as a Russian in newly independent Uzbekistan. I couldn't comprehend the situation she described. I couldn't imagine how it was possible that someone I knew, a fellow teenager, could be experiencing the things in her letters. I wondered if maybe the words on the thin airmail paper had changed shape or meaning during the journey half-way around the world.

    There was a student from Kazakhstan at my university, and I asked him about her letters. "She sounds really scared," I said.

    "She should be scared," was all he answered.

    Reading Marra's book about Chechnya, I thought about Kate for the first time in years. I only got one letter from her after she moved to Moscow, and I have no idea how her life unfolded after that year we were eighteen. Marra's book brought detail to my imaginings of what Kate's life in Uzbekistan might have been like in those early years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Reading Marra's words, I felt the crunch of the frost beneath my feet and the shadow of hunger and hopelessness in my gut and the rumble in the floor and the walls as the bombs fell or the trucks rolled through in the dark of night and wondered how much of it lives in my long-ago friend's memories, as reality rather than as fiction as I've experienced it.

    This makes it very difficult to give this book a star rating. "Liked it," "Didn't like it," "It was amazing"---these categories don't fit. In a way I loved this book; I loved the language and the way it drew me into this world. In another way, I really didn't like it because the world into which it drew me is one that I don't want to admit existed---and in other iterations, still exists. This book left me feeling sad and embarrassed for something I didn't do and never lived. It could have left me with confidence in the human spirit, but instead I just feel like my only options are to close my eyes to everything outside the narrow confines of my middle-class, never-left-the-continent American life or to be swept away by the relentless wave of history which seems so full of the dark side of human nature it's difficult to see what's good in our species.

    My spouse accused me of putting only depressing books on my to-read list, and after the last two books I've read, I'm hard-pressed to refute his claim.

    (P.S. In the end, I ended up giving this book my standard four stars; I'm not sure what I mean by those four stars, but that's what I settled on.)

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    More than I ever wanted to know about the ethnic wars in Chechnya. Very sad.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not only did I give this five stars, I would list this as one of my favorite books. It's moving. It's heartbreaking. I can understand the psyche of those torn by war and how it leads to a range of behaviors, yet their essential humanity comes through - both positive and negative. I knew nothing about wars in Chechnya, and certainly not that the most recent have been just ten years ago. The book moves back and forth over a ten-year period with a handful of characters in a village. Sonja has returned from England as a surgeon and almost single-handedly keeps a hospital open. Her life intersects with men from the village, and a young orphan girl, Havaa, becomes a saving grace as Sonja takes her in after her father is "disappeared." The writing is just beautiful. I found myself rereading passages just for the choice of words and the emotions it evokes. It's heartrending. A definite favorite read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Many things to admire about this book, but not an easy read. (Note: not a beach read. Do not bring on vacation to sunny locale.) Anyone who is interested in the sad and horrific recent history of Chechnya should certainly read this book. I admired the author's ability to depict story elements like torture and being "disappeared" in a way that went beyond the horror of the actual events and focused more on the thoughts and feelings of the victims as they went through this - even when the characters were fearful and uncertain, they seemed noble and brave. Perhaps the best example of this is the character of Ramzan the village informer - when the author finally describes what he went through to become a man that has informed on a dozen neighbors, resulting in their torture and deaths, you end up, while not forgiving him, at least understanding. And that's quite a hat trick.The writing is very good and quite beautiful in places, but I withhold a star because there were more than a few sentences or paragraphs where I had to read them several times to figure out what he was trying to say - at one point I looked to see if this was a translation from a nonEnglish language. Also, I found jumping back and forth between the years was confusing, despite the clever and useful timeline at the beginning of each chapter. But overall, a great piece of story telling that makes you feel just how it was for these characters (so get ready, because it's quite a bumpy ride).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm blown away...and the author is so young!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I couldn't give this novel a 4 star rating so I gave it a 5. Has anybody every heard of Bookcrossing? They have a 10-star rating system which allows for a more precise review. This novel would be a 9. Why? Character development. Just a little more work for that magic element to make readers connect with the characters, like Kingsolver is able to do. She has developed that concept quite well, you leave her novels feeling like you're leaving friends and family behind. Even with that slight imperfection I was so impressed with Marra's work. I don't think it will appeal to every reader, however. I think mature readers will appreciate this more, readers who enjoy the complexity and meatiness of a well written piece of literature. I am SO looking forward to reading more of this author's future work, I hope he is working on something right now.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Though the stark setting, and initially unrelated events made this book exceedingly hard to get into, the poignant ending made the journey worthwhile.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a book about a war that essentially has very little war related content. The Author tells a story interwoven with richly developed characters set in Chechnya during a complex, conflicted time of war. Knowing hardly anything about the conflict in that region, I was grateful for the brief clarified scenes that connected me to the story. The Author didn't overly describe the trials of the war but grazed them just enough for the story he was trying to tell.

    The characters of the book broke my heart, each one stuck in the life they were given (never easy to face that). The internal struggles of freedom, betrayal, survival, love and loss are blanketed within all the different characters who're connected in the large web of life. It's hard to break away from this novel, I found myself researching and delving deeper into Chechnya and it's history. Anthony Marra may not have thrown down the entire history by pen but he definitely seems to have peaked this interest within his readers to find out for themselves. What a clever little devil he is, intentional or not.