Review by New York Times Review
THE MOST VIVID character in "The Tsar of Love and Techno," Anthony Marra's new story collection, is not a person but a place, specifically the Russian city of Kirovsk, an arctic purgatory of nickel smelting plants, where one out of every two residents contracts lung cancer. In Marra's Kirovsk there's a polluted man-made lake surrounded by a dozen smokestacks that locals have named the Twelve Apostles; more memorable still is the White Forest, a field of metal and plastic birches planted in Soviet times by the local party boss's wife, to combat the city's reputation as an eyesore. Everything about the place reeks of disaster, even the name: Sergei Kirov was a Bolshevik whose assassination - probably on Stalin's orders - became a pretext for the show trials of the 1930s. And since Marra's preoccupation is history, and its ability to both erase and lend meaning to individual lives, Kirovsk is a fitting centerpiece for his audacious, strange and occasionally brilliant book. In many ways, Marra's Russia is a place as extreme as the wartime Chechnya of his acclaimed first novel, "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" - it's possibly less lethal but just as corrosive. In "The Tsar of Love and Techno," the war in Chechnya remains the catastrophe at the center of many of the stories, but here Marra's broader scope positions it as merely the latest in a series of calamities that span 75 years and shape the book's large, nearly Tolstoyan ensemble of characters. These characters are interconnected and recurring, giving the collection the feel of a novel, and Marra's narrative jumps from one to another like the flu. The first story is set in Leningrad in 1937, the height of Stalin's purges; its protagonist, Roman Markin, a retoucher in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation, blots out the faces of the condemned from newspaper photographs. One of those faces belongs to a prima ballerina who stages "Swan Lake" in a labor camp, and later in the collection we meet her granddaughter Galina, who rises above the bleakness of her native Kirovsk by becoming Miss Siberia and marrying Russia's 14th-wealthiest man. Galina's high school boyfriend, Kolya, enlists as a contract soldier and goes missing in Chechnya, where his younger brother, Alexei, a college-age techno fanatic, travels to find him. Elsewhere we meet Ruslan, a curator who opens a museum of regional art in his ramshackle apartment in Grozny, and Sergei, a teenage grifter who accompanies a legless army veteran begging aboard the trains in St. Petersburg's metro. These are only some of the characters, many of whom turn out to be connected to one another in intricate, often unexpected ways. This material may suggest that "The Tsar of Love and Techno" is a heavy-handed or grim piece of writing. That it is neither is a testament to Marra's seamless prose, telling use of detail and brisk pacing. The narration throughout is particularly agile - the stories move between first and third person, and one is narrated by six of Galina's friends, who appear as a kind of Greek chorus. Marra endows each of his narrators with a distinct voice, particularly Alexei, who dreams of being a professional aphorist and tends to sound both endearing and comically overwrought. This is how Alexei describes the experience of a nightclub crowded with beautiful women: "The heat-seeking desire flowing from my heart via my southlands was indiscriminate in its aim." Populating a book with a multitude of distinctive narrators would strain even the most resourceful stylist, and not all of Marra's are as convincing as Alexei. At times, the retoucher Markin can sound like a historical tendency come to life. When his interior monologue yields sloganeering like "The light of socialism burns bright enough to illumine even his brutish soul," a reader can be forgiven for wondering whether even loyal supporters of totalitarian regimes think in such platitudes. The linked characters aren't the book's only connective tissue; there are also several recurring, mysterious objects: a photo of the ballerina, a mixtape Alexei gives Kolya on the eve of his departure, and an oil landscape by the 19th-century painter Pyotr Zakharov-Chechenets. The last is altered, embellished and redacted so many times that it begins to function as a metaphor, a palimpsest attesting to the historical upheavals alluded to in the book. Zakharov-Chechenets was a Russian painter of Chechen origin, and here his landscape embodies the complex and ultimately tragic relationship between the two cultures, a relationship that animates both of Marra's books. Marra's feel for post-Soviet Russian life (he lived in St. Petersburg as a college student) is assured and considered, especially in his handling of Vera, a pensioner who had denounced her mother during the Great Terror. Like many Russians of her age, Vera struggles with the new order; many of her values and cultural touchstones have been leached of value and meaning. Marra's vivid descriptions of her milieu - the leather-bound volumes of Gorky she decides to sell, the passive-aggressive exchanges with her newly prosperous friend Yelena, the trips to a kiosk to buy chocolate bars "so aerated they could be used as packing material" - lend Vera verisimilitude and depth. When she becomes an unwitting accomplice in a murder, her grief and guilt result in some of Marra's most powerful writing. THERE ARE WELCOME flashes of humor throughout, particularly the dark, sardonic strain that Russians call chernukha. Watching his hapless father speak about his passion project - a homemade space capsule to be used in the event of a nuclear war - Alexei remarks that "his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis." After taking English classes, Sergei calls Americans at home and steals their identities by posing as an I.R.S. agent with a Russian accent; he tells his father that he finds his clueless victims by trolling Tom Hanks's Facebook fan page. "Those who enjoy his acting are unfamiliar with human nature," he explains. A handful of plot devices - like the conclusion to Markin's story and the book's futuristic coda - feel overly familiar, as though recycled from a big-studio Hollywood film. Some of the cosmic connections feel overdetermined and too neat, and the vertiginous telescoping in time and the sheer number of characters sometimes make it difficult to spend enough time with a favorite one before the reader is whisked away. But these missteps barely register in the wake of a book this ambitious and fearless, one that offers so much to enjoy and admire. At a time when a lot of fiction by young American writers veers toward familiar settings and safe formal choices, Marra's far-ranging, risky and explicitly political book marks him as a writer with an original, even singular sensibility. Of course politics alone isn't enough to create art. In writing so evocatively about the harrowing stories of his characters, both Russian and Chechen, Marra brings to mind the novelist Tatyana Tolstaya. "Politics disappears; it vanishes," she told an interviewer. "What remains constant is human life." Marra's Russia is a place as extreme as the wartime Chechnya of his first novel. ALEX HALBERSTADT is the author of the forthcoming "Young Heroes of the Soviet Union," a family memoir.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This powerful collection of interconnected short stories by the gifted Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, 2013) spans the gamut of the Russian experience, covering the years 1937 to the present. In the opening story, The Leopard, set in 1930s Leningrad in the catacombs beneath the city, Roman Markin, a censor working for the government, meticulously removes all traces of so-called dissidents from paintings and photographs. In their place, he creates images of his late brother, from boyhood to old age. Roman is driven by guilt for having informed on his brother, seeking to preserve his brother's image and his own grief. Art is one defense against the bleak, oppressive society created under communism; another is the biting black humor of the hopeless. In The Grozny Tourist Bureau, the former deputy director of an art museum has been recruited as tourism director of his bombed-out city. Well aware of the absurdity of his mission, he seeks inspiration in the pamphlets from the tourism bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston. Marra, in between bursts of acidic humor, summons the terror, polluted landscapes, and diminished hopes of generations of Russians in a tragic and haunting collection.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Communists, oligarchs, and toxic landscapes from Siberia to Chechnya define this collection of tightly linked stories from Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, 2013). In fact, let's go ahead and call it a novel: though the individual stories bounce around in time and are told in different voices, they share a set of characters and have a clear narrative arc. More importantly, they share a command of place and character that strikingly reimagines nearly a century of changes in Russia. In the opener, "The Leopard," a communist censor in 1937 secretly inserts his disappeared brother's face in the photos he retouchesa fact that re-emerges in later stories and also serves as a symbol for how what's lost in Russia never quite disappears. (An oil painting of a bland Chechnyan landscape plays a similar role.) From there, the story moves to chilly Kirovsk, a cancer-ridden industrial town that's struggled to adjust to the fall of Communism, and hometown of Galina, a middling actress who's risen to fame thanks to her marriage with Russia's 13th wealthiest man. In Chechnya, we meet her childhood boyfriend, Kolya, who's been taken prisoner after becoming a soldier. Marra's Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony; Kolya's stint in captivity is "the most serene of his adult life," while elsewhere a man is roped into trying to sell mine-ridden Grozny as a tourist destination. ("For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.") As in his previous novel, Marra is deft at managing different characters at different points in time, but the book's brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution: KGB thugs then, drug dealers and Internet scammers now, with a few stray moments of compassion in between. A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.