A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena ~ Anthony Marra

Late one night in 2004, in Eldar, Chechnya, Federalist soldiers capture a villager, Dokka, whom they accuse of being involved in the shooting of a Russian colonel two years earlier. They search the house for his young daughter, Havaa, and when they can’t find her, they burn it down. Dokka’s friend and neighbor, Akhmed, finds Havaa hiding in the woods with a little blue suitcase, and knowing the Feds will be looking for her, tries to find a safe place for her to live. He takes her to the hospital in a neighboring town. The town is in ruins, the hospital is down to three employees – a doctor, Sonja, a nurse, Deshi, and a guard with one arm. Akhmed hopes that Sonja will give him work (he is also a doctor, from the bottom 5% of his class), and also keep Havaa safe.

From this beginning, we learn the history of Sonja, of Dokka, of Akhmed, and of other characters that come into the orbit of the hospital. We learn their hearts and minds, and their fates. I don’t know a lot about the wars in Chechnya, and you don’t learn a lot of wider world detail here, other than that they were brutal wars and living in a brutal time under a brutal regime. If I were Engie, likely I would look things up. I am me, and I just immersed myself in the writing. It is the writing that I loved about this sad, difficult book. The story was beautiful and tragic and painful, but the writing…just beautiful.

”We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”

”There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”

”Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn’t say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving.”

I had this book on my TBR for at least a decade, and am so glad I finally pulled it down and read it. Highly recommended.