Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Thinking about the book "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" by Anthony Marra

One of the great things about a brand-new fresh book from a young author is that no one has said much about it yet.  One can consider what it means, without overlays of other people's interpretations already coloring the landscape.  This book is extremely rich, luminous, full-bodied.  It is a once-in-a-great while achievement.   I am still compelled to think about it, all the parts of it, as well as the whole.  It has not faded, but is like the glowing embers of a fire, which was a bonfire of sumptuous proportions.

I  must say that I love to read.  I have re-read Anna Karenina 4 times, and War and Peace twice.  I have read Checkhov's stories at least 3 times,  Doestoevsky (the Brothers K)  twice.  So the potential connections to Russian literature, which were what drove Anthony Marra to visit St. Petersburg in school, and possibly to writing in the first place, are not completely lost on me.  And I will also say that I love children's books, and am a big fan of the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling.   What I love about the best books is how they help hone one's consciousness about what it is to be a human being.  Tolstoy is the greatest writer, still, because of his ability to show so many textures and colors to any scene that it comes "alive"-- his cinematography shows us when a smile is enigmatic, when it is delighted, when it is ironic.  And he is able to follow the thoughts of so many persons, of so many psychological bents,  so amazingly well!  But the depth charge is always to ring the bell of the conscience, to hone recognition of the soul, the needs of the soul, the peculiar growth of the soul.
The big theme in this book, for me, is the story of Abraham and Isaac.  It is all the more interesting because the culture he writes about in Chechnya is Islamic.  The people are Abrahamic.   He is writing about the way humans behave in a time of war, in a fringe area of a terrible devastation, with a huge sense of defeat, and invasion, and bullying.  There is no victory, there are no victors, there is no "rightness' to the geopolitical landscape in which the story is set.  One could call it a wilderness, with brambles.  It is very post-modern;  the landmines, the urban orphans scavenging, the hopeless question of whether it is federal troops or guerrilla warfare-revolutionaries doing the bullying, and how in so many ways, it doesn't matter.  It is also very post-modern in that the main character for "stability" is a woman surgeon, trying to keep a hospital going, and who has calluses on her hands, from using the bone saw to amputate all the victims whose legs have been blown to smithereens.
The two stories of the child-parent bond, are Dokka and his daughter Havaa;  and Khassan and his son Ramzan.  They amplify and resonate and clash with each other.  The amazing amazing thing, is that the ultimate question is whether to help a child live, or to destroy the child.  It is this fundamental question, which I think is the underpinning of the JK Rowling books also.  And the question is the soul's question.  And I think for all of time, I will see that small piece of paper which Akhmed has left for Khassan, with the word "mercy".
We are absorbed, many of us, with the problems of PTSD, of torture and its sequelae.  We are also absorbed with prostitution, drug-addiction and the hellish power of the procurers of whatever can be sold;  guns, drugs and people.  Against the backdrop of a time-immemorial landscape of the hills one heads for when there's political trouble (the Caucasus);  where there are forests, snow, no electricity, minimal roads, and minimal access to modern conveniences, there are only the ballast of story-telling, hearsay, rumor, memories, and the ways we treat each other.  The landscape helps throw the human behavior into stark relief.
There are severe mercies, in this book. There are immense beauties.  The writing is like a summer field full of fireflies.   The memory Khassan writes, of Dokka peeling plums is shimmeringly lovely.  It is then even harder to bear the crippling of his hands.  I love the description of Havaa's birth, and of how Natasha comes back to life as she helps mothers with birthing, with new babies.  I love the way Akhmed gives his wife a bath.   The soul lessons are about the simplicity of kindness, the costliness of compassion, and the gift of freedom from bullying, from becoming the thing you hate.  And even at the landfill, dancing for joy, as we know that the child has been saved.  There are things about friendship, and love, and the things we hold dear, even through immense suffering.  And I think one of the great gifts of this book is to recognize that the ones who are tortured can still refuse to become the torturers.  We can understand the reasons, and still say no.  It is in this that Marra's book resembles the way Tolstoy wrote,  to me.  There is the old-fashioned kind of honor in it, which is durable, time-immemorial.  When I went to the bookstore reading here in Santa Cruz, a lady said "I resent you for making me understand and care about the bully."  I thought that was a great compliment.  We cannot drop down into black-and-white thinking, and we need to pray for mercy, for humility, for help to reach for the better way to be.

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