Discussing the various meanings of his title in an interview, Foer spoke about his love of illuminated manuscripts – ‘embellished, overstuffed books’. 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.
Now with Extra Libris material, including a reader's guide and bonus content from the author.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. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja's world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. New York Times Notable Book of the Year In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home.
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