Vital phenomena definition8/14/2023 A Constellation of Vital Phenomena should be required reading.Two years later, in October 2015, Hurricane Patricia broke the sustained speed record held by Haiyan on the Mexican shore, being registered at the National Hurricane Center ( NHC) as the most intense hurricane ever registered in the Western hemisphere. And civil wars and atrocities against nationalist uprisings still crowd today's headlines. Humanity continues to ignore the lessons of history. Marra's novel is a brilliant combination of fate and facts. Historical fiction is a blend of author-directed "fate" amidst the chosen facts of what happened and was recorded. The pistol that Dokka gave her will be traced to a colonel's murder and lead to Dokka's second arrest. Natasha has again departed and was a guest at Dokka's shelter on her way to the border. Khassan's first volume of Chechen history will inspire both Sonja and Natasha to keep serving their war-battered compatriots. But this thread is only one of several remote past connections linking the characters, revelations that the reader knows even as the characters do not. She eventually returned and helped Sonja in the shell-shocked hospital, where she had acted as a midwife at Havaa's birth. Sonja was a brilliant student who completed her medical training on a scholarship in London.īut while she was away in England, Natasha disappeared, forced into prostitution and drug addiction in Romania. Khassen lives with but won't speak to his son, who avoided torture at the hands of the Russians by providing them with names of rebel neighbours.ĭoctor Sonja lives in hope that her younger sister Natasha will return. He still played chess with Khassan, the other village intellectual, who was forever working on his multi-volume history of Chechnya. His price for this hospitality was to ask each of them for some small token - a photo, a button, a clump of hair from a deceased son, all of which Havaa saved in her suitcase.ĭokka had already been arrested earlier and his fingers were severed when he kept silent. Havaa's father, Dokka, was the village philosopher who sheltered any and all war refugees who passed through their village. His wife is slipping into dementia, so when Sonja insists that he help at the hospital in exchange for her caring for Havaa, he agrees, walking the 12 or so kilometres to and from his home each day.Ī Constellation of Vital Phenomena takes place over just five days in 2004, with alternating chapters exploring the back story of each character, during the previous 10 years. Akhmed is also a doctor, but one who barely graduated and a man who would rather make drawings of his patients than treat them. Sonja Rabana is the sole remaining doctor in the region's hospital, which remains open despite being partially bombed by the Russians. He finds Havaa clutching a blue suitcase and decides to take her to the only woman he knows who can offer her sanctuary. From across the road, her father's friend, Akhmed, also watches in fear as Havaa's house burns to the ground. Havaa is an eight-year-old girl who watches while hiding in the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father for aiding the Chechen rebels. Was it just my turning a deaf ear to that conflict, or was the war in Chechnya under-reported in the West? Either way, I finished this novel both better informed and more empathic to the suffering that war always entails. As the world watches the atrocities pile up in Syria, it is instructive to review the history of horror that was Chechnya in the 1990s before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union. To me, the awkward title is the only flaw everything else in this book is memorable. The book appeared in May, published not just in Canada but in a dozen other countries as well - which is no small feat for a first novel. The title of Anthony Marra's first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Random House Canada, 400 pages, $24.95 softcover, $14.99 Kindle) comes from a definition of "life" published in a Russian medical encyclopedia
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