Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Welcome to the Cephalopod Coffeehouse, a blog-hop to exchange reviews of our favorite reads. I read two great books this month: this one, and Wave, a grief memoir I review over at The Writing Sisterhood. Both of my reviews are edited forms of reviews I first posted on Goodreads.

"What did any one person matter, when pounded against the anvil of history?” That sentence, from the novel, is what I see as the theme of this book. History is a hard anvil for many parts of the world right now, and Chechnya's the setting for this particular pounding. But Marra's novel is not so much about the politics, ideologies, or even history of Chechnya (though you get some of that). It's a book about what it's like to be a one little person trying to live your life in a family, a home, a village, and a country that has become an endless war zone.

“...she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence—of fear, of pain, of grief—but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness.” 

This is an incredible book. It's a brutal catalog of the horrors of war in a faraway, cold, miserable place, but it's also a testament to human dignity and resilience. The writing, too, is virtuosic: I found myself rereading passages just to savor the beauty of Marra's prose. If it wasn't a library book, I'd have highlighted half of it.

“I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.”

“If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”

Chechnya. In case you were wondering.

Some reviewers have described the book as confusing, as it's told by an omniscient narrator who is privy not only to everyone's perspective but also to the past and future. POVs switch rapidly between the large cast of characters, and Marra employs the unusual strategy of jumping forward in time when he lands on a particular character he likes, even if it's a nameless character who only exists on one page. You will suddenly leap forward into that character's future, getting a quick rundown on what happens the rest of her life and how she dies.

Why does he do this? I think it goes back to that theme: "what does any one person matter?" Every character matters deeply to himself—and to his family and friends. Even torturers, even cynical informers, even heroin addicts. War stories are typically about battles, generals, nations clashing. This war story focuses on friends, lovers, parents and children. You learn to care about each character in this little forested section of Chechnya, and you feel so frustrated on their behalf, because you realize this is real. There really is a war there, and people like this, people like you and me, are shoved around like so many tiny unimportant pawns. 

“‘You are a coward,’ she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.”

If it sounds like a relentless catalog of pain and brutality, take heart: there's actually a surprising amount of humor. Almost all of it comes from dialogue. For example, when a surgeon in a ruined hospital makes a reference to the Bee Gees, an old woman intones, "You can tell by the way I walk I'm a woman's man, no time to talk." The surgeon expresses shock that this semi-senile Chechen would know the song, to which the old woman responds, "People used to recite it in the war. I didn't know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur'an." Moments like this make the frozen, blood-splattered narrative bearable. The ending, too, was incredibly moving (I reached for tissues) without being at all surprising, since we pretty much know most of it already thanks to the flash-forwards. It's hard to believe the central span of the book takes place over only five days.

“Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.”

Anthony Marra. Yes. He is 28 years old.

By the end we understand how each of the disparate characters is connected (often in ways they themselves never understand) and we learn about most of their futures. That we know so much about them, but they are kept in the dark about their own stories, feels very real. So much of our own lives will remain forever unknown to us, especially regarding our connections to other people. By showing us the limitations of the characters’ knowledge, we're reminded how we will never really know our own stories, not fully.

“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”

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Please hop on over to these other blogs to find more February favorites.

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	Scouring Monk
3.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF	4.	Wishbone Soup Cures Everything
5.	The Random Book Review	6.	Words Incorporated
7.	StrangePegs -- The Casual Vacancy	8.	Read, Write, Repeat
9.	Mockity Mock Mock	10.	I Think: Therefore, I Yam
11.	Julie Flanders	12.	The Writing Sisterhood
13.	StrangePegs -- Brave New World	14.	V's Reads
15.	the-cephalopod-coffeehouse-february-2014.html