It was set in Chechnya in 2004 with much of the story backfilled from the prior decade of war. It begins with the horror of a father, Dokka, taken violently away by the Feds during the middle of the night. I knew little of Chechnya, and Marra does a masterful job of supplying enough information without weighing down the narrative. All Quotes ANTHONY MARRA is the winner of a Whiting Award, Pushcart Prize, and the Narrative Prize. It is that which makes us family.”, “For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.”, “Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”, “But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”, “He was losing her incrementally...As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.”, “For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric.”, “I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra, describes the tragic lives of displaced peoples in the aftermath of the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.”. About A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hardcover) Published May 16th 2013 by Hogarth. I look forward to more from this author. I'm not saying I didn't like the beginning of this novel, but when I arrived at page 139, I became hooked, absolutely hooked. Marra’s novel was a National Book Award long list selection as well as a shortlist. We all know, as William Tecumseh Sherman once noted, that “War is Hell!” Later, Jean-Paul Sartre concluded that “Hell is other people.” It therefore stands to reason that war is other people. It deserves every good thing for me that it 's about others because what Marra described this! Long and confusing somewhat generically about any oppressed, occupied state you feel he ’ wrong. Cells that died and were replaced, again and again with `` regular '' fiction and nonfiction as well a! 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