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I loved this portrait of ordinary people doing their extraordinary best under the duress of war in Chechnya. Their human spirit shines through like the grass that grows in the cracks of a sidewalk. I was inspired with Marra’s ability to portray how in the face of war’s devastation, people focus their purpose on whatever family members or shreds of community they retain, and when even that is gone, they forge a virtual family.

Most of the story takes place in a few days in 2004, with flashbacks to the two periods of invasion of Chechnya by Russian Federation forces in 1994 and 1999, which was marked by massive civilian casualties by bombings and artillery strikes. During extended periods of occupation, systematic repression and torture was rampant to assure that this republic did not break away as so many other Soviet states did after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book is not concerned with the politics and combat of the specific war, but with the miracles of human nature within the society impacted by such events. Marra stretches hard to make language capture this life as “a constellation of vital phenomena��.

Almost everyone is a hero in this tale. The two main characters are doctors. Akhmed is a Muslim primary care doctor in a rural community in southern Chechnya. He saves an orphan girl, Havaa, from federal forces that killed her father and burned her home. In the first pages, we experience him finding eight-year old Havaa and placing her in sanctuary at the hospital in the nearby city of Volchansk. Sonja is a female surgeon of ethnic Russian origin who has taken over the running of the hospital in this bombed out city. The price she asks of Akhmed in return for the favor is for him to serve on her medical staff, which calls for daily forays from his caretaker role for his disabled wife.

The evolution of Akhmed and Sonja’s relationship was wonderful for me. She is superbly competent but gruff and cynical, with no bedside manner, whereas Akhmed is warm and self-deprecating, but poorly equipped for the task. He was always more interested in art than medicine. His most recent art was putting up around his village large portraits on panels of the disappeared, a touching act Marra bases on a real event. Sonya schools him in trauma care and lessens his despair by instilling a sense of purpose, and he in turn helps humanizes her, makes her laugh, and raises her hopes of finding her missing sister . Humor helps break down barriers between them:

He was an incompetent doctor but a decent man, he believed, compensating for his physician limitations with his empathy for the patient, his understanding of pain.
…”I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and a boor.��
“I think it’s the other way around��, she said. A gauze of afternoon cloud cover had wrapped around the sky and she looked up and into it. “I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.��

Havaa’s story of resilience and poignant efforts to make sense of her family’s loss makes her a hero too. Although Sonja generally hates kids, we see Havaa’s precocity begin to win her heart when the child first speaks to her of her “disappeared�� father:
“He’s an arborist. He knows everything about trees. I’m still a minimalist.��
“Do you know what that is?��
Havaa nodded, expecting the question. “It’s a nice way of saying you have nothing.��
“It’s important to know big word��, the girl said, repeating her father’s maxim. “No one can take what’s indside your head once it’s there.��
“You sound like a solipsist.��

Another key character, is Khassan, a friend and neighbor of Akhmed who has worked his whole life on a 3,000 page history of the Chechen. The muted voice of the people is epitomized by the succession of regimes that have refused to allow him to publish any of it except the segments up to the Middle Ages. He is further silenced by the interruption of his friendship and regular chess playing with Havaa’s father and by his termination of all communication with his remaining family member, a son who has been tortured into becoming an informer for Russian security forces. The most moving part of the book for me lies in Khassan’s finding relief from his isolation by disclosure of the story of a secret love affair from his past to Akhmed’s bedridden and demented wife. This story takes place against the background of Stalin’s transplantation of their families along with half a million of native Chechens to Kazakhstan, which lasted from 1944 until repatriation of survivors in 1957.

The prose in this book is what often makes it special to me. Sometimes it calls too much attention to itself, and sometimes it comes off as clumsy, requiring reading the sentences more than once to achieve understanding. As an example of success, here the torment of Khassan’s son is captured as he experiences the impact of having to become an informer:
Snow had thickened the ground. The quiet of the house followed him into the woods. Two hundred meters in, raising his head in a long scream, he tore a hole in the silence through which he could walk more freely.

Here is an example that does well at first in capturing Akhmed’s shock of dealing with a victim of a landmine, but to me it overreaches toward the end:
�� he wasn’t the first man he had seen writhing like a noodle in a pot of boiling water, not the first he had seen with half his shin hanging by a hinge of sinew. But when he saw this man it was like seeing the first man for the first time: he couldn’t think, couldn’t act, could only stand in shock as the air where the man’s leg should have been filled the floor and the room and his open mouth. …Then the man’s pulse was a haphazard exertion against his finger.

I admire Marra so much for trying and often succeeding that I have to forgive him for flying too close to the sun sometimes. Here is a final example, which sings so well about Ahkmed’s feeling of loss of his wife to dementia but to me stumbles at the end:
He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray brown hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there. The dishes no longer prepared or eaten. The walks no longer walked, the summer woods, the undergrowth parted by their shins. The arguments no longer argued; no stakes, nothing either wanted or could lose. The love no longer made, desired, imagined, or mourned. The illness had resorted to an innocence he was unwilling to pollute, and the warmth of her flesh cocooning his was a shard of their life dislodged from both their memories.

Against the forces of erasure, the characters nurture life through their memories, spark hopes for each other, and find windows for humor and for love. Morality is frequently compromised, but the wellsprings of their personal integrity are preserved. No wonder 13 out of 15 of my GR friends rendered 4 or 5 stars for this debut novel. Marra looks too young to believe he could create this out of imagination, research, and visits to Chechnya. But he wrote it at 28 years of age, and a Stanford professor where he was a graduate student in creative writing was quoted as saying his skills were already fully developed. In an interview included at the end of this book, he cites the influence of Benioff’s “City of Thieves��, which despite its portrayal of suffering at the Siege of Leningrad is “filled to the brim with life, love, humor, even joy, all of which only enhance and make more real the underlying historical tragedy.��