Questions for the author....

I hope you enjoy this Q&A with Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
This Q&A is now closed for further questions.
Thank you!
Davina (BookBrowse Editor)

I first became interested in the region as a college student in St. Petersburg. I arrived to Petersburg shortly after the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated, presumably for the reporting she did from Chechnya. I realized that Chechnya was a place I didn't know how to spell and couldn't find on a map, but the ramifications of the wars there had reached as far north as Petersburg, where on a daily basis I saw Russian veterans soliciting for alms in the Metro stations. I began reading nonfiction accounts of Chechnya and quickly became fascinated. Its history and culture has inspired writers like Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Pushkin. The accounts I read of ordinary people in remarkable situations were the kinds of stories that I felt needed to be brought to life through fiction.

But to answer the question of why set a novel in Chechnya, my answer would be that it is a setting that magnifies and dramatizes the moral conflicts of characters in extraordinary ways. This cast of characters wants what we all want—to live peacefully and provide for our loved ones—but their circumstances require them to make decisions the reader will hopefully never have to make, but nonetheless will understand.

I ended up writing four first-to-last-word drafts. Each time I finished a new draft, I'd print it out, set it in front of my keyboard, and retype the entire novel. Because retyping mimics the original act of creation, it taps into whatever creative well the sentences first rose from. The novel changed from draft to draft, then, from within, organically, rather than from changes that were superimposed on it. There's a scene early on when Khassan despairs as he realizes that he must again retype his 3,000-plus page history. Thankfully, Constellation isn't nearly that long, but I still knew exactly how he felt. I also kept a daily word-count record. My goal was to hit a thousand words every day. The days when I recorded zero words felt like wasted days. I grew up going to church and Sunday school each week, and at long last, I was able to put that Catholic guilt to good use.

I once heard Allan Gurganus say that writers should strive to make readers laugh and cry on every page. It's a tall order, but I absolutely agree with the reasoning. Novels need the high as well as the low notes in order to be true to the emotional reality of life. When I traveled to Chechnya, I was repeatedly surprised by the jokes I heard people cracking. It was a brand of dark, fatalistic humor imprinted with the absurdity that has become normalized there over the past two decades. A book I thought of while writing Constellation was City of Thieves by David Benioff. Benioff's novel pays tribute to the immense suffering caused by the Siege of Leningrad, but it's filled to the brim with life, love, humor, even joy, all of which only enhance and make more real the underlying historical tragedy. Hopefully, Constellation works in a similar fashion.

War breaks cities, buildings, and families, but also time and the way stories are constructed. To tell this story in a straightforward, linear fashion would fall short of capturing the absurd, recursive manner in which its characters assemble their chaotic narrative. All the characters in Constellation are trying to piece back together their fragmented lives, and I wanted to embody that in the novel's structure. As each character attempts to rescue what has been lost, the novel mends their individual stories into a communal whole.

My mom has six siblings and my dad has four sisters, and between them all there are more cousins than I can count, which means that family events have always been filled with voices, stories, and laughter. From an early age I learned from them that stories are how we understand one another, how we preserve the past, and how we make meaning from the chaos of our lives.

I've been really lucky to have had the opportunity to work with an extraordinary group of publishing professionals. I met my agent in 2009 when she visited my MFA program, and we began working together a few months later. For maybe a year or year and a half we went back and forth on numerous drafts of Constellation, getting it as good as we could, before sending it out. Everyone at Hogarth has been just incredible.

Q. In your interview with Jill Owens on PowellsBooks.Blog she asks you about using the phrase "a constellation of vital phenomena" as your title. You responded, "There are these six vital phenomena... ...six point-of-view characters in the novel." Prior to reading this I thought there were seven main characters: Sonja, Akhmed, Havaa, Khassam, Ramzan, Dokka and Natasha. Which character am I incorrectly including? Also, what is the "point-of-view" of each of your six main characters?[/b]

A. Good question—when I mentioned six point-of-view characters, I meant the six characters who have at least one entire chapter told more or less from their point of view, which would be Sonja, Akhmed, Havaa, Khassan, Ramzan, and Natasha. Dokka has partial chapters told from his POV, but not an entire one.

Q. I very much enjoy the meanings and ethnic roots of characters' names. I think that Sonja is an apropos name as it means "wisdom" and is a diminutive of Sophia; the character in the Russian classic, "War and Peace," who sacrifices her romantic love for the greater good of her family. How/why did you select the names for Constellations other characters?

A. In general, I chose the characters' names because I liked the way they sounded. Giving each character a name that neatly defines his/her personality seems a little bit of a cop out for a writer. It's the character that imbues the name with meaning, rather than the other way around. However, I'm happy to learn that the name Sonja has its root in “wisdom."

I'm currently rereading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, trying to figure out how those two novels handle such vast swaths of time so elegantly.