A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra was our book club book this month. It tells the tale of a small group of friends during the war in Chechnya in 2004.  A girl's father is abducted by Russian forces and the neighborhood must band together to save her. It leads us through this war-torn country, back and forth in time, before, during, and after the war, and is bleak as all get out.

I definitely don't want to be living in a place where a war takes place, that is for sure.  The most intriguing part of the book from my perspective were the day to day details that showed how life changed so gradually. The author talked a fair amount about food and you could kind of see the descent from food like you and I eat to food if you're really hungry to food if you have it to food is so rare that you have taken to eating unconventional items in the hope that you get some nutrients from them.

I also thought the plot lines that delved into the survivors' guilt and PTSD to be understated, but well done.  Yep, the doctor is addicted to opiates because it's her coping mechanism. Yes, the sprite is imagining conversations with her schoolyard bully who was killed by the Russians. It all makes complete sense in a world in which nothing makes sense.

I thought this book was an awful lot like All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which is to say that the plot was similar, but they cover different wars. They're both award-winning novels that have beautiful writing and I would recommend reading them.  But there's a remove between the reader and the characters that I think is on purpose as a symptom of PTSD, but that remove makes it seem more like I'm watching a movie rather than intimately getting to know characters like I expect to in a novel.

Read it if you like. Even if you don't know much about the Chechen war, the book will take you along and explain what needs explaining.  It's well done and doesn't take all that long to get through.