The Tsar of Love and Techno

Starred review from August 3, 2015
Marra follows A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (one of PW’s 10 best books of 2013) with this collection of nine interconnected stories, divided into sides A, B, and intermission. They probe personal facets of Russian life, from 1937 to the present—from Chechnya to Siberia and from labor camp to hillside meadow. In the first story, Roman Markin, a Stalin-era specialist in removing purged individuals from photographs and politically correcting artwork, airbrushes out his own brother, then begins secretly inserting his brother’s face into other pieces, including a photograph with a ballerina he’s erasing and a landscape by 19th-century Chechen painter Zakharov into which he’s adding a party boss. “Granddaughters,” set in the Siberian mining town of Kirovsk, focuses on Galina, the ballerina’s granddaughter. Inheriting her grandmother’s beauty if not her talent, Galina captures the Miss Siberia crown, the attentions of the 14th richest man in Russia, and a movie role in Web of Deceit, while her sweetheart, Kolya, ends up fighting and dying in Chechnya. In “The Grozny Tourist Bureau,” deputy museum director Ruslan Dukorov rescues the Zakharov landscape from war damage, then paints in his wife and child—killed, like Kolya, in the meadow depicted in the painting. The title story follows Kolya’s brother to the meadow. “A Temporary Exhibition” shows Roman’s nephew at the 2013 exhibition of Roman’s work arranged by Ruslan and his second wife. Marra portrays a society built on betrayal, pollution, lies, and bullying, where art, music, fantasy, even survival, can represent quiet acts of rebellion. As in his acclaimed novel, Marra finds in Chechnya an inspiration his for his uniquely funny, tragic, bizarre, and memorable fiction.

May 1, 2015

It's great to see Marra back so quickly after his recent New York Times best-selling and multi-award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. And it's no surprise that the stories here are set variously in the Soviet Union and Russia, with some featuring Chechnya, whose wars were the subject of Constellation. Among his characters: a 1930s Soviet censor pining over photographs he must alter of a disgraced ballerina and women recalling their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled in Siberia.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015

Love and war, loyalty and betrayal, are themes inextricably joined in the literary imagination. Marra, who dazzled readers and critics with his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, once again captivates with this collection of stories spanning 75 years. Linked by generations of political rebels, artists, soldiers, and criminals, these tales pay homage to the victims of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resulting wars in Chechnya. It's a time when brother turns on brother, children on parents, coworkers on each other. History is rewritten by the victors and trust is a word without meaning. Yet from this darkness Marra creates characters full of love, repentance, and even hope. A man sells a valued painting in order to finance a blind woman's surgery. A husband, facing the imminent death of his wife from cancer, takes his family on holiday to a contaminated lake where people swim with rebellious joy. An artist who turned his brother in to the authorities assuages his guilt by surreptitiously sketching that brother's likeness onto each canvas he censors for the government. VERDICT Marra's numerous awards (the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the Whiting Award, the Pushcart Prize) were no fluke. With generosity of spirit and a surprising dash of humor, these artfully woven narratives coalesce into a majestic whole. [See Prepub Alert, 4/6/15.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.