![]() ![]() We learn of the ballerina’s fate in “Granddaughters,” a story told in the first-person plural, which tracks the briefly serendipitous life of the ballerina’s granddaughter, Galina. On one job, charged with editing out a ballerina, he inexplicably leaves her hand to dangle in the air and pockets the picture. Roman is set with the task of brushing up Stalin’s cheeks and blotting out the condemned from newspaper photographs. “Leopards,” the opening story, set in the tunnels of Leningrad in 1937, follows Roman Markin, a retoucher for Stalin’s Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. … Roughly, one for every two Chechen.”Ĭharacters and objects spill from one story to the next. Locals swim in Lake Mercury, a man-made concoction of “industrial runoff ringed by gravel.” Not only that, but the Chechen wars “made the republic among the most densely mined regions in human history. The landscape is charred, arranged around the production of violence in hardscrabble industry. Many of these interconnected stories take place in the gloomy, vividly drawn Siberian town of Kirovsk. In “The Tsar of Love and Techno,” Marra returns to war-torn Russia and beyond. With “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” Anthony Marra’s debut novel, we met an unbelievably sophisticated writer who chronicled the two Chechen wars with equal parts humor and pathos. ![]()
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