So since the Narrative Magazine spring short story contest wrapped up only a couple of days ago, I thought it might be a good idea to go back and break down the winning entries in more detail, for craft, setting, and plot to get a sense of what might be the really strong points for each of them, and maybe give some insight into what makes these stories special.
I spoke a little while ago about the “cold opening” that “Chechnya” uses, but this is not the only distinguishing mechanic in this story. So let’s just start of with a bit of a summary and some key facts about the story and kind of take it apart haphazardly in search of some of its finer points.
This story is about 7,000 words long and it is really three stories which sort of “center” on the character of Sonja, a doctor in a nameless1 Chechen city. Sonja is a doctor in the city hospital who has a mysterious man arrive with a small girl. The story follows the man2 and his quest to protect the little girl he brings to the hospital, Sonja as she finds in the little girl a reason to go on, and on Natasha, Sonja’s sister and one of the reasons3 that Sonja is so damaged.
Two of the most interesting mechanics at work in this story are the broken narrative which shifts from character to character, with blocks ranging in length from nearly a thousand words to a few hundred and the choices Marra makes in his use of free indirect speech to describe the action.
The broken narrative is the most interesting part of the craft of the story, and it is interesting foremost because of its chronological non-linearity and its occasional lapses in importance. One might figure that in a prize-winning story the author would not still be filling in the back story of a dead character who never figured centrally in the plot, and this is perhaps one of the stories weaknesses.
Establishing genuine pathos is a pet-peeve of mine, because I think emotionally connecting with a piece of fiction, and with the characters in a piece of fiction is really difficult to do well. It’s difficult to quantify what makes a particular character empathetic, but showing them doing something truly and deeply human is perhaps the easiest device, and it is the device employed by Marra to greater and lesser effect in this story.
In the character of Sona we are supposed to see someone damaged by the ravages of war, who at the end of the novel brings a little girl home with her, and so allows herself to feel again. In the character of Natasha, we have deep jealous at her sister’s intelligence that drives her to take a terrible risk that ultimately does not pay off, and in the character of Akhmed we have a man who knows he will ultimately die in his quest to preserve the identity and the life of the little girl4 he rescues after her parents die.
The summary itself5 reveals which of these characters will end up the most sympathetic. Now characters do not always have to sympathetic, for instance, it is perfectly acceptable for them to be merely engrossing6. But this story is so spare in its depiction of each of these people, we are destined only to know these sketches. None of these characters take on the feeling of flesh-and-blood often because their motivations are so hollow. One can wonder if Marra was trying to depict the total desolation of war by writing in such a spare style, but even if its true, what is gained in atmospherics is lost in empathy.
And the very thing that makes Chechnya a classic Narrative Magazine short story is its conceptual richness, but the problem is that it is almost strangled by its marriage to the puzzle-fitting narrative. There is a repetition of the first line of a “story of a mosque” which might at the outset be affecting, except none of the characters are genuinely different from the first line to the last and the story has such an overdetermined quality that the theme of an “untouched mosque” which might have the possibility of beauty and hope in a hopeless landscape falls flat. Add to that the theme of Cannibalism, which is at it’s core meant to be a metaphor for the Russo-Chechen conflict and you have a story that really clunks at times in its reach for symbolism. Its claim to richness comes in the reader buying into the various people running around, but often the characters feel like ciphers, and this is where the peculiarity of the use of free indirect speech in this story comes to the fore.
The starkest example of the peculiarity of the author-character relationship is in the scene in which the most sympathetic character7 is taken:
Some men are cannibals and some are angels, he thinks, but most are merely men. His wife remains asleep, unaware of any reality beyond her dreams. He takes the time to disinfect her forearm before piercing the skin. A sigh as the drug hits her bloodstream, her eyelids flashing open, her heart rate slowing to silence. The men outside pound on the front door, but the sound of fists on wood reveals neither ethnicity nor allegiance. Akhmed puts a small bandage on the pulseless vein, then draws his palm across her face, closing her eyes. The pounding against the door grows louder as the men outside switch from fists to feet. There’s innocence in the world, Akhmed believes, and it is possessed not only by the young and naive. When the men break through the door, Akhmed is on his knees. He prays for his wife, that Allah may welcome her in paradise. He prays for Havaa, that she might live to have a natural death. But when the men start beating him, when they throw him into the back of the waiting truck, Akhmed prays only for himself.
In this sequence of thoughts one can actually see a hopeful critic’s summary in the text. It’s about men, and about ethnic conflict cum cannibalism, and it’s about the possibility of innocence in a world where it seems like there can be no innocence, etc, etc. Clunk clunk clunk. Why isn’t this man trying to get out of his house? What does his house look like? Why is he unafraid? Why do the characters in this story behave the way they do?
Asking questions like that is guaranteed to bury any empathetic reader, and so we are left where we began. If you like clocks and puzzles, this story holds a lot of appeal. If you like portraits and careful clipped sentences, I recommend it. But if you fancy the truly moving experience, the transcendent piece of fiction of which anthologies are made, Marra has a few more stories to write before he gets there.