A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

I know I am late to the party, as I am just now reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. It has been on my radar since it came out in 2013. I saw it at Barnes and Noble, and remembered a friend's recommendation ("just READ it!", she said). So I am.

     

Starting in 2004 during the second Chechen war (I will admit I have been woefully ignorant about these conflicts), A Constellation of Vital Phenomena starts out with Havaa, a young girl, waking after the night she hid in the woods and her father was taken by the Feds. After her father was taken, she stayed the rest of the night with her neighbor, Akhmed, and his ill wife, Ulla.

Akhmed panics on this day after the disappearance of Havaa's father, as he knows that the Feds will likely be coming for the girl, too. He takes Havaa to a hospital that is several miles away to stay with Sonja, a woman doctor he has never met.

Moving between 1994 and 2004, Marra weaves the story of Havaa, her missing father, Dokka, Akhmed, Ulla, Sonja, another neighbor Khassan and his son, Ramzan who is an informer, and their war ravaged country.

While some of this book is intense - some of descriptions in the hospital are pretty graphic - this is some of the most stunning and beautiful prose I have ever read.

If you can, read this passage slowly...

"Sonja stood and walked to the flat, afraid of what she might hear next. At the kitchen table she examinded 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 of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure, but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now 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. She raised the glass to her lips. The water was clean."

Not only is the writing beautiful, Marra also captures realities of loss, love, pain, grief and describes them in such a way that I see them with new eyes. I am in the middle of this and am reading slowly, savoring the writing.

Lovely and amazing.

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Language Arts by Stephanie Kallos

Do you remember watching the movie The Sixth Sense? And when, at the end, you realized that the boy, Cole, had been seeing dead people all along, it changed your experience of the entire movie? (At least that's how it was for me.) I didn't see the twist coming at all, and I loved it.

In Language Arts, we meet Cody and his family. Cody was a happy little boy. He was developing normally until he started to lose language. His parents, Charles and Alison, took him to specialist after specialist to find out what happened and to try to help him get better.

Cody doesn't get better. Shortly after the birth of Cody's sister, Emmy, Charles and Alison's marriage deteriorates. As Cody gets older, and ages out of the system that can provide care for him, Charles and Alison have to work together to find a suitable living situation for him.

     

We see everything as Charles and Emmy experience this. Kallos weaves together this family's struggle, including back story around Charles, with Charles as a child befriending an autistic classmate, language arts, and, interestingly, Palmer handwriting. Language Arts felt a little melancholy, heavy with this family's desperation to try to help Cody as well as deal with deteriorating relationships.

I was engaged in the story as it was, and then a Sixth Sense kind of twist came at the end that made me go back and reread passages of the book to see how she did it. SO well done!

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Second Life by S.J. Watson

I read Watson's first book, Before I Go to Sleep, and really enjoyed it.* I was excited to see her second book, Second Life, at the library!

        

Narrated by Julia, wife to surgeon Hugh, mother to teenager Conner, Julia has a hidden past. She reveals this past slowly. After the death of her sister, Julia's past starts to get real again. Julia gets involved with a man she meets online. She rationalizes this affair as a way to understand her sister and explain her death.

I found myself not liking Julia, and not believing that she would actually do the things she did with the reasons she gave for doing them. I almost gave up on this book. But it came around for me, and I'm glad I stuck it out. A good read!

*See my write up of Before I Go to Sleep here: http://notthenewyorktimesbookreview.blogspot.com/2011/08/good-reads.html

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Rereading a Few Favorites

I rarely reread books anymore. I used to when I was a kid, eagerly, excitedly, as though I were trying to absorb the words and stories into each fiber of my being.

As an adult? I think I've felt as though there are always new books to discover, and that is where my excitement has been going.

But here I am, rereading a few favorites. I went to Powell's last week with my daughter and I bought two books that I used to own and I want to reread.

I found out that I will be the (lucky!) recipient of a book through librarything's Early Reviewers program, Christopher Moore's next, called Secondhand Souls. Yay! Secondhand Souls is the sequel to A Dirty Job, which I loved. It's been several years since I read it, so I want to read A Dirty Job again before I read Secondhand Souls.

I'm really enjoying reading this again. Poor Charlie Asher, Beta Male, right after his wife dies in childbirth, finds out that he's a death merchant and has to collect soul vessels and pass them on to their new owners. That sounds kind of heavy, but, in usual Christopher Moore style, it's smart and funny. And in addition? The cover glows in the dark.

         

And the other one? A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

Recommended by good friends when I was living in a book desert (before the internet I lived in a rural area where there was one small, sad little bookstore that stocked mostly Harlequin romances). When I got my hands on Bryson's book I devoured it, and began a love affair with all things Bryson.

     

And it's going to be a movie with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte!

As my partner has wisely taught me, books and movies based on said books are different things. Most of the time it isn't even right to compare them. They are different animals. I agree with this. I loved Gone With the Wind the book AND Gone With the Wind the movie, even though the movie left out a lot that was in the book.

Have I been disappointed in a movie based on a book? Sure. Mostly because I was watching the movie with book eyes, the eyes that I wanted it to be the same, or rather, I wanted to have the same experience that I had with the book, which isn't really fair to the movie.

Will A Walk in the Woods movie be as good as the book? It will be different. Is it silly to reread the book before the movie comes out? Shouldn't I just enjoy the movie for what it is and not compare the two? Maybe. And I don't care. I am looking forward to enjoying the book again.

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