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416 pages, Paperback
First published May 7, 2013
«Δεύτερος πόλεμος. Δεύτερη φορά σ’ εκείνο το μέρος. Ήξερα τι θα γινόταν. Ήξερα ότι δε σταματάει ποτέ. Σου φυτεύουν μια ντροπή που συνεχίζεται σαν ατέλειωτη γέφυρα, την ταπείνωση, τη γαμημένη ταπείνωση να ξέρεις ότι δεν είσαι ανθρώπινο πλάσμα, αλλά μια δέσμη νευρικές απολήξεις που ουρλιάζουν, όπου το μαρτύριο συνεχίζεται, ακόμα κι όταν ησυχάζει ο φυσικός πόνος.»
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.
Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.
For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.
The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor peculiarities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face.
As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain.
Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.
“Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.”This is Marra’s debut novel, and in it we see his queerly outsized talent and deep knowledge of human motivation and possibility. Where did he get the knowledge from which he created this book, and how did he come to know it? In what he calls his Bibliography, Marra credits Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Åsne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, and Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition by Sebastian Smith for giving him much of the background he needed to imagine this place, in this time, a ten–year period between 1994 and 2003.
“Not knowing what to do, [Kassan] walked back and forth [in the snow], urging the dogs to do so likewise, turning the snow into a riddle no one could solve.”