![]() ![]() 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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