“In what prayer does the last human not die alone?” Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is a remarkable fiction writer from America. He has been awarded with many prizes since his first book was published. After his stunning first book, the “Α Constellation of vital phenomena”, an amazing novel – which has met the praise of the critics and the readers worldwide – for the brutal practices aimed at weakening the social ethics and values that are trying to survive, and drown in the blood a distorted history, Anthony Marra returns with the emblematic “The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories” to confirm his literary prowess and simultaneously justify all those who believed from the beginning that he is one of the greatest writers of the American literature.
It is a journey through the history of Russia, from Leningrad of 1937, Siberia of 1999 to Chechnya of 2000, and today’s St. Petersburg. Marra makes the human characters revolve with tremendous dynamic consistency in history, run through it and form the fictional Marra’s world in a very dynamic narrative.
This book is an exquisitely written collection of nine short stories, indissolubly connected and exciting that captivates the reader and shows, once more, Marra’s great talent. These stories are connected to each other with distinctive but shockingly distinct joints. The stories can also stand completely autonomous and be read with equally enormous interest.
Marra presents his characters in a scoptic way. From the Orwellian painter who corrects history by erasing or altering human figures from old photographs in Stalinist Leningrad and being accused of spying, because he is fascinated by the photo of a ballerina, the women who tell their own story and the story of their ancestors found guilty of Gulag, the brothers who faced violence Mara’s heroes are unable to understand how they are possible for the human to adapt in a modern, impersonal fate, being steeped in irrational and lack of any logic.
The heroes are trying to keep their balance on the stretched rope of the new reality, between the memory and its recording. They are called to accept what restricts human behavior, demolishes memory, historical events, past life and leads man to a new kind of adaptability. People are scared, terrified, try to close their wounds. Eventually, they survive by continuing their lives away from everything that hurt them.
Fight with futility? Accepting loss? Consciousness of the infinite minimum of a human life? How important can the truth be in the recording of the past and in the consciousness of the future? These questions are posed by Mara but the writer enjoys balancing his narration between passion, mood and violence, between the political and war orders and their results. His heroes suffer and act in a world that does not accept their conscience. The Soviet era of Russia and the regime imposed by censoring consciences are the result of a violent political era, and Marra seeks the way in which consciousness manages to mature in these circumstances. To express their opposition or consensus and to look at the parameters of the coming future.
Anthony Marra is a talented and gifted writer. The language he uses is accurate and sharp and it’s a real pleasure when you enjoy the text in the original language. His stories have all these characteristics that make a book astonishing. Love, humor, suspense, dramatic moments and certainly action and a cinematic plot that makes it an excellent literary book.
Marra focuses on the barbarity of an era to emphasize the redemptive power of humanity. He suffers for the human’s loneliness. And this is his major thought. He describes it better in a single sentence of the book, which summarizes its essence– and has been awarded with The Literature.gr Phrase of the Year 2016— when he says: “In what prayer does the last human not die alone?”
Anthony Marra is the New York Times-bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. His website: http://anthonymarra.net/
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