In 2013, Anthony Marra published the first English-language novel about the Chechen wars, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a sumptuous, nonlinear piece of literature. With The Tsar of Love and Techno, he revisits Chechnya and its decades of turmoil, over the lion's share of a century. Beginning with a failed artist, assigned to censor pictures, Marra entwines the stories of one pastoral painting, a ballerina, a conscripted soldier, his brother and a mixtape given "In Case of Emergency!!!" as decades and decades pass, to form a constellation of spellbinding short fiction.
While war-torn Eastern Europe might seem like a dour setting, Marra suffuses his narratives with an idiosyncratic, dry comedic edge to counterbalance recurring themes of loss and heartache. In "The Grozny Tourist Bureau," the narrator guides his tour group of wealthy businessmen through the city, answering their questions about bulldozed rubble ("suburbs") and a mass grave (an "attraction for archaeology enthusiasts... millions of years old") according to cheery propaganda notes. While explaining his phishing scam to his father in "A Temporary Exhibition," Sergei offers an illustration, "You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she'd shout into it and no one would hear her. That's Facebook."
Marra's incisive use of humor enhances the compelling stories in The Tsar of Love and Techno to render fully the dilemmas their characters face. Whether it concerns the painter incarcerated for treason he didn't commit or the dancer who rises to fame in spite of herself, resilience blooms along a tumultuous timeline, and demonstrates how comedy sprouts where reality deviates from the propaganda line, even in the face of tragedy. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness