But its ambitions don’t stop at exhaustive research and breaking new fictional ground though less brilliantly intellectualised and dazzling than Everything is Illuminated, with its tricky double time-scheme, Marra’s novel is just as committed to a superabundance of narrative life. Politskovskaya’s two books on the country were among the nonfiction sources on which Marra had to rely, as he was unable to get to Chechnya until last year, when, as he recounted drolly to a journalist, he was able to join a ‘Seven Wonders of Chechnya’ tour.Ī Constellation of Vital Phenomena hinges on the story of a Chechen villager who, over five days, tries to save a young girl from a Russian death squad. He has set out to write the only novel about modern Chechnya, a country where the war crimes witnessed by murdered Russian journalist Anna Poliskovkaya were so appalling that the academic introducing her collection of dispatches, A Little Corner of Hell (2005), described reading it as an act of ‘moral labour’. This sense of wanting to be more than a book applies just as aptly to Marra’s novel. ‘I love the idea of books being more than books,’ he said, ‘or being, rather, something other than books.’ Discussing the various meanings of his title in an interview, Foer spoke about his love of illuminated manuscripts – ‘embellished, overstuffed books’.
With this fearlessness comes a fierce awareness of the book as a volatile technology, part of a tradition of accumulated stories that are historical and powerful but also, somehow, not enough. You can find a similar boldness in Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (2011), which threaded magic realism into the Balkans conflict, and even Nam Le’s The Boat (2008) falls into this company, with its stories’ quietly flamboyant demonstration of geographic reach. Eggers told the story of his parents’ deaths with self-mocking grandeur while Smith’s group of angry Muslim youths in London laboured under the acronym KEVIN. In the vanguard were David Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, both published in 2000. Twenty-eight-year-old Marra is at the young end of a generation confident about embracing the world, including its dark matter, with the narrative cleverness and even playfulness of a rediscovered postmodernism. Then there is the enormity of its subject – the recent Chechen Wars – to which we can add the author’s youthfulness on publishing his first novel amid significant buzz.
First there is its title’s announcement of cosmic ambition. I am not the only reader to see a strong family resemblance between A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and Everything is Illuminated (2002), Jonathan Safran Foer’s surprisingly comic fictional account of a post-Holocaust pilgrimage back to the family shtetl in Ukraine.
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