A constellation of vital phenomena movie12/15/2023 ![]() Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father’s fate-and her own. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European emigres: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. ![]() Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.įifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini’s Italy to 1940s Los Angeles-a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena ‘Its prose pulses with humour, wit and affection’ Mail on Sunday Sometimes tragic, often hilarious’ Karen Joy Fowler, Observer, Books of the Year The story moves between the real war and the better version Hollywood is busy creating. ‘In Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra (John Murray) a young woman escapes from Italy to Hollywood, leaving her father behind. ‘A multifaceted novel that is funny, verbally inventive and moving’ Sunday Times, Book of the Year Each possessor’s deepest yearnings are often best understood by their relationship to these objects.Chosen as a BOOK OF THE YEAR in the Sunday Times, Stylist and Observer A mix tape, photographs, paintings - they appear and reappear, retouched, damaged, redacted. Marra deftly handles this amused disregard with a dark humor that adds a necessary buoyancy to an otherwise bleak range of stories. “Whatever life-preserving instincts evolution endowed him with have been war-blunted to an amused disregard for all mortality, particularly his own.” In “A Prisoner of the Caucasus,” Kolya is captured by the rebel army and, after spending a few nights in a body bag at the bottom of a well, is chained to his comrade, Danilo, while they plant an herb garden outside a picturesque dacha. In the title story, Galina is the object of Kolya’s high school affection. Galina goes from awkward goose to beauty contest winner, movie star and, finally, wife of a powerful oligarch. 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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