Where his first effort felt virtuosic but somewhat airless, Marra here emerges with an oxygenizing wisdom and an arsenal of wit as inexhaustible as it is unlikely, given such forlorn terrain.
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.
Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased.
I admire the artistic conscience Marra displays in The Tsar of Love and Techno, his equitableness and commitment to present the dead-end lives of Russians who gained nothing from the Soviet collapse and ended up in Chechnya. I enjoyed seeing characters develop through plots and appreciated some of his formal ingenuity, but I think the collection falls a bit short of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
The Tsar Of Love And Techno should be a sad book, but I walked away from it remembering it as funny. Marra's gimmick here is that the world is cruel, is capricious, is murderous absolutely, and his characters are, too — just not all the time. Where the world is consistently terrible, the people Marra fills it with are occasionally kind, occasionally joyous, occasionally funny.
The painting is a fitting motif for this ingenious book. Mr. Marra depicts Russian history as a palimpsest of horrors, in which the crimes of the past never disappear even as tragic new layers are added.
What makes this (dare I say) masterpiece so stunning is Marra’s clear love for his subject and insistence on infusing beauty into even the darkest places.
There are so few bright spots in the lives of these characters and yet hope endures...Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno is its own kind of sweet oblivion.
