Anthony Marra is truly gift writer. His Constellation of Vital Phenomenon is on my, “All Time Best Books I Ever Read” list. I don’t actually physically keep such a list, but if I did it would be one of the top books on that list. This book is similar in its evocative stories and the way they weave in and out against the back drop of the Russian experience from the 1930’s through to what is now the era of the former USSR.  

We begin in 1930, with an artist who must artfully remove offending images from photographs and other records. He deftly removes or repairs the faces of men and women who have become persona non grata in the current Communist regime. Stuck in a basement in Leningrad, the artist works on his current project, the photograph of a ballerina who has recently fallen from grace. Mesmerized by her grace and beauty, he fails to remove all of her, leaving a ghostly image of her hand behind. Now he himself becomes suspect but even as he suffers the same fate as the people whose images he so carefully removed, he leaves behind another legacy that will not be discovered until many years later.

We move on to hear the stories of women in a Siberian mining town. Descendants of prisoners of a gulag who chose to settle here. The women know the hardships that their mothers and grandmothers endured. But as the stories are told one young woman, who yearns to leave this accursed town, finds hope in a legacy that she did not know she had.

Marra continues to weave more stories, which jump back and forth in time until the present; the legacy of love between two brothers, or the fate of a landscape painting with its view of a peaceful garden, all come together in a strangely satisfying whole.

Marra’s gift is to drop little hints, little ‘easter eggs” of information, that when you look back begin to build a bigger holistic picture from so many disparate lives and events. Marra expects his readers to work a bit, to find and use the hints and the clues that he leaves behind, rather than spoon feeding you with what you need to know.  His descriptions are immersive and you feel present at a ballet performance, or in the middle of a skirmish in Afghanistan, or in a garden watching the sun slowly sink down behind the hill. He never wastes a word or an image or a conversation, each one adds to our understanding of the characters and the choices they make. This is defintiely another book to add to the “All Time Best Books I Ever Read List,” that I don’t actually keep!

Brenda’s Rating: *****( 5 Out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Keith, Ken and Marian

Book Study Worthy? YES

Read in ebook format.