Biography
Marra was born in 1984 in Washington, D.C. He attended high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and has lived in Eastern Europe, though he now resides in Oakland, California.
He attended the University of Southern California where he earned a bachelor's degree in creative writing. And he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Between 2011 and 2013, he was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he also taught as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction.
Marra has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Publications
2013. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate
Anthony Marra is the New York Times bestselling author, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, as well as the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction.
He has also authored a number of short stories as well as essays.
Publications
2015. The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories
This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts.
2022. Mercury Pictures Presents
Location
Dugway Proving Ground
Dugway Proving Ground (DPG) is a United States Army facility established in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons, located about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. It encompasses 801,505 acres of the Great Salt Lake Desert, an area the size of the state of Rhode Island, and is surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges.
Testing commenced in mid-1942. During World War II, DPG tested toxic agents, flamethrowers, chemical spray systems, biological warfare weapons, fire bombing tactics, antidotes for chemical agents, and protective clothing.
During 1943 the "German Village" and "Japanese Village" set-piece domestic "hamlets" were built at Dugway, for practice in the fire-bombing of homes of the types in urbanized areas of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire's Home Islands. DPG was slowly phased out after World War II, becoming inactive in August 1946. But it has been periodically re-activated following that date. Much of its activity has been a closely guarded secret.
In March 1968, 6,249 sheep died in Skull Valley, an area nearly 30 miles from Dugway. When examined, the sheep were found to have been poisoned by an organophosphate chemical which coincided with several open-air tests of the nerve agent VX at Dugway. Local attention focused on the Army, which initially denied that VX had caused the deaths, but necropsies conducted on the dead sheep later definitively identified the presence of VX. The Army never admitted liability, but did pay the ranchers for their losses.
Miniatures—Perspective
Complete with back lot, sound stages, and facilities buildings, the miniature was a faithful replica of the ten-acre studio in which it sat. Maria Lagana, as rendered by the miniaturist, was a tiny, featureless figure looking out Artie’s office window. And this was where the real Maria stood late one morning in 1941, hands holstered on her hips, watching a pigeon autograph the windshield of her boss’s new convertible. She’d like to buy that bird a drink.
instead of Devil’s Bargain she found herself thinking of the scale model of Mercury. She didn’t know what drew her to it. Perhaps it was seeing Mercury through a medium anathema to that of the movie factory it depicted. So much of a movie’s meaning came down to who it deemed worthy of a close-up, a perspective, a face. But within the zoomed-out omniscience of the miniaturist’s gaze, all were worthy, as if the camera had pulled back until it held every bit player in its frame.
If you were to pull back right then, you would see Anna, the miniature’s architect, alone at her table, sketching a Berlin tenement on her napkin.
Miniatures—Perspective
Pull back farther and you would see Artie coasting west on Santa Monica Boulevard in a cream-colored Continental, each block bringing him nearer to the brother he loathed.
Pull back farther still and you would see Union Station, where a Calabrian fugitive traveling on a dead man’s papers was stepping off the train with Maria’s address in his pocket, a cigar box in his carpetbag, a knot in his throat.
And you would see Maria pass an equatorial jungle, a Gothic castle, a brownstone street as she crossed the backlot to her office. You would see her linger at the Italian Piazza set. Change the signage and it became any European village, but Maria had modeled the set on the little piazza in Rome where every Sunday her father had taken her to the cinema.
It was a small square encircled by clay-roofed buildings, cafés, and shops, all false fronts. The marble and travertine were painted plaster and plywood.
Miniatures—Perspective
Standing there, Maria repopulated the empty piazza with the evening passeggiata: pigeons bolt from footfall, sleek signorinas glower from the imperious heights of their heels, an old man’s part wilts over his forehead as he scoops steaming balls of horse manure into a fertilizer bag.
In the alleyways, loaded laundry lines lift imperceptibly with each droplet of evaporated weight. Everyone watches one another, yet no one sees Maria. She’s twelve years old, walking beside her father. Their footsteps rise and fall, rise and fall, like sewing needles stitching them to the city, and it seems impossible that this is about to end, that it’s all about to disappear, that outside the confines of a Hollywood set, she will never see Rome again." (pp. 19-21)
Cast of characters—Maria Lagana
Italian immigrant who becomes an associate producer at Mercury Pictures; she's a career driven woman in a male-dominated world, repeatedly denied recognition or reward for her work because she's a woman, although she is also the backbone of the film company and indispensable to her boss Artie. Her boyfriend is Eddie Lu, but she refuses to marry or have children.
She carries a heavy burden of guilt because her impulsive decision to burn her father’s papers led to his arrest and imprisonment, and led to her emigration, with her mother, to the US.
Father is Giuseppe and mother is Annunziata, names that metaphorically represent Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child.
Striking out against the prejudice, and to help boyfriend Eddie Lu, she begins to produce a film he writes The False Front on the backlot at night. Ned finds it, takes it to the Board, and Artie has to cancel it. Distraught, Eddie leaves her and the film.
When Ned, Artie's twin brother, removes him from the Mercury Pictures Board, Artie starts a new film company, Jupiter Pictures, and hires Maria who negotiates a higher salary and 25% of the profits. They are successful.
Cast of characters—Maria Lagana
After Maria meets Leni Riefenstahl and views the famed director’s work in service of the Third Reich, she is troubled by “the spectacle of a filmmaker pressing her undeniably singular vision into the service of a picture that denied the singularity of individual experience. Riefenstahl marshaled hundreds of thousands of participants without betraying the slightest curiosity in human beings. The resulting picture was a feat of engineering, as precise and soulless as a munitions production line. No wonder German consuls screened the picture for foreign governments to weaken resistance in the run-up to invasion. Maria had left the theater overrun and defeated. (pp. 311-312) The film is Triumph of the Will.
When she begins filming The False Front, she wants it to be obvious that the film is flawed, realism perfected by error. The constant reminder that you are watching a faulty record made it viscerally trustworthy.
Cast of characters—Giuseppe Lagana
Maria's father, and one of Rome's most prominent defense attorneys until arrested by Mussolini's henchmen and sentenced to internal confinement at San Lorenzo—"confino." Although he no longer had clients when Fascism took hold, every evening he wrote legal arguments on his typewriter, in defiance of Mussolini's law. Maria found these papers, and trying to shield him, took them to an alley to burn; but they were discovered and exposed her father. Neither parent blames her for what ensued.
In San Lorenzo, he tries to make a life for himself although confined to geographic limits, and confined for a time in the Vault. Signora Picone, the town passport photographer, takes him in to teach her son Nino. When Nino's mother dies, Giuseppe hires Concetta Cortese to take him in and raise him with her own son Vincenzo, described as "a hormonal freak of nature." They are Giuseppe's foster family.
Cast of characters—Giuseppe Lagana
The three men plot an escape. Vincenzo was to steal a car, but is caught and killed. Nino and Giuseppe hide his body in the tunnel, then rig it to explode. Nino takes the derelict boat and escapes, but it can't hold Giuseppe as well, who stays behind.
"He will never leave San Lorenzo. He can see that now. By nightfall the podestà will throw him into the Vault. There is, then, only one thing left before the defense rests. With a final push, he propels the rowboat into the current and watches the Busento carry away the boy he once pulled from the water (p. 213).
Cast of characters—Annunziata Lagana
Maria's mother, withdrawn from Giuseppe, she sleeps permanently in the guest room, takes sleeping pills. Maria is the translator between them. Despite this, she tries to bribe the deputy minister who arrested Giuseppe, and grants sexual favors, but to no avail.
As a child in 1908, she experienced an earthquake but remembers more vividly the tsunami that followed.
"a moonlit range snowcapped in sea foam rising higher and higher until it obscured all of Sicily but the ruby corona of lava reflected in the clouds over Etna. The tidal wave swallowed and regurgitated towns along the Calabrian coast. Tottering through the wreckage, Annunziata couldn’t imagine how these million strewn pieces had ever fit together. All around, strange sea creatures drowned in the air. Limp marine plants dredged up and dragged inland slumped from broken rafters. The sky writhed with the air traffic of a hundred thousand departing souls. Several of her relatives, including her mother, had vanished into the water that day, disappearing with such finality it seemed they hadn’t drowned but dissolved into the froth. After Annunziata moved north and married Giuseppe, she purchased herself a plot in Rome’s Verano cemetery." (pp. 38-39)
Cast of characters—Annunziata Lagana
Before she and Maria leave, she fills Giuseppe's brown suitcase with soil from her grave site:
It was cumbersome, ungainly, a heaviness too impractical to bear, and yet she carried that portable grave across the Atlantic, then across America, because she would not surrender the piece of Roman ground she had gone so far to stand upon, and, if she died in exile, she would at last return home. (pp. 49-50)
She and Maria remain somewhat estranged. Maria wants her to admit that she was at fault for her father's banishment, but Annunziata won't do that to her daughter.
Cast of characters—Artie Feldman
Co-founder and head of production for Mercury Pictures, not known for his joie de vivre, but known for his toupees, named after their personalities: The Heavyweight, The Casanova, The Optimist, The Edison, The Odysseus, and The Mephistopheles. (p. 4).
He's also a "master bullshitter" who appreciates Maria's honesty, efficiency, work ethic, and ability to solve his problems, but won't grant her credit for her expertise within the film production industry.
Artie could be maddening, capricious, and self-absorbed, but he had done more to support her career than anyone else. He had promoted her over the protest of male colleagues. He respected her opinion and had faith in her abilities. When he learned another executive had tried to get handsy with her, Artie slugged the guy and gave Maria his job. Editorials denouncing Artie for rending the nation’s moral fabric papered his office wall in lieu of good reviews, but there was no one whose morality Maria admired more than his. (pp. 12-13).
Artie's wife is Mildred
She had an endurance runner’s resolve, a prison warden’s temperament, and if twenty years handling Artie’s prickly personality had left her callused and nettled, what but love had kept her from leaving? She was his person, the only one on God’s green earth who could stand the sore sight of him. (pp. 103-104)
Cast of characters—Ned Feldman
Ned is Artie's slightly older twin brother.
There wasn’t a time when they hadn’t been at each other’s throats. Raised in Silesia, at the eastern reaches of the German Empire, where anti-Semitism was all the Prussians and Poles had agreed upon, Artie and Ned had outlasted their state, their kaiser, their real names. In 1901, their older sister, Ada, raised the money to send Artie and Ned to live with relatives in New York, where ten years after immigrating, the brothers opened the Titanic, an unfortunately named nickelodeon furnished with seats rented from a funeral parlor. (p. 94)
Artie sends his sister money each month, until he learns she has died; Ned sends nothing.
Late in the novel, Ned arranges for Artie's removal from the Board of Directors and pays him $3 million for his share of the company. Artie successfully opens a new business, Jupiter Pictures. Under Ned, Mercury Pictures fails.
Cast of characters—Eddie Lu
Maria's boyfriend, but without a long-term commitment, forbidden by California law. He is a character actor to whom Maria steers bit parts.
Eddie Lu was a self-taught Shakespearean actor and the night clerk of the Montclair, the residential hotel just off Hollywood Boulevard where Maria lived. Though he radiated the leading-man exoticism that catapulted Valentino to stardom, Eddie didn’t benefit from even an Italian’s off-brand whiteness, and thus Fu Manchu villainy was the most he could reasonably hope for. Unreasonably, he hoped for more. He knew by heart the leading lines of the major tragedies, but the stage was no less miserly with opportunity than the screen. (p. 17)
He provides a room for, and becomes friends with Vincent (Nino)
Cast of characters—Eddie Lu
When Mercury Pictures begins making propaganda films for the US government, Eddie gets a part in
Tell ’Em In Tokyo—an espionage drama in which he starred as a nefarious Japanese spymaster—he knew he would regret accepting the role. He knew with equal certainty he would not turn it down. The contract was $2000/week. More than enough to buy back later the scruples he pawned now.
But as production ramped up in January, he grew increasingly uneasy with the role. His character existed as little more than a constellation of crudely joined stereotypes and paranoid fantasies. How could he bring to life a part written to remain lifeless? The director rebuffed his efforts to invest the caricature with character. “You weren’t hired to act,” the director told him bluntly. “You were hired to be hated.” (pp. 351-352)
When Maria is denied credit as producer for The Devil's Bargain, she plots to develop a film The False Front for Edie to write and star in. Secretly she begins production, with Artie's support, until Ned takes it to the Board, and the film is shelved.
Cast of characters—Eddie Lu
"He’d fine-tuned every line and gesture but still hadn’t come up with a satisfying ending. He couldn’t get himself off the Tell ’Em in Tokyo set at the end of the chase scene. Every exit was blocked. Remaining in Hollywood meant remaining on that set, in that character, in one form or another, forever." (p. 437)
And so Eddie leaves, taking with him the brown suitcase that Maria's mother had packed with soil from her gravesite.
Cast of characters—Pep, Mimi, Lalo Morabito
Maria’s great-aunts with whom she and her mother live after leaving Italy. They own a trattoria:
"Their husbands had passed in swift succession and, in the decades since, they had waited for God to reunite them. On this point, they were disappointed. God condemned any Morabito woman who survived childhood to ninety years of life. Each night the great-aunts intended to pass in their sleep. Each morning they arrived at breakfast in black dresses billowing like an armada bearing bad news." (p. 53).
From the acknowledgements:
My father and his sisters descend in part from Calabrian and Sicilian emigrants, and the most rewarding aspect of researching this book was the opportunity to hear the stories and see the photographs they inherited. My great-aunts Mimi, Lala, and Pep were far too individualistic to saddle with pseudonyms; the characters bearing their names share few of their personal details, but a lot of their personality. (pp. 572-574).
Ciccio Scopelliti: a snake-oil salesman, director of the Lincoln Heights Funerary Society, and door-to-door salesman "desensitized to rejection." He marries Mimi.
Cast of characters—Concetta Cortese
A widow and mother to Vincenzo living in San Lorenzo, she agrees to take in Nino when his mother dies; Giuseppe pays her.
Vincenzo is part of the escape plan with Giuseppe and Nino, but is killed trying to steal a car. Three years later, Ferrando tells her what happened, and she still answers that Nino is her son when his identity is challenged. When back in LA, Nino buys her a house.
Cast of characters—Rocco Ferrando
"When Inspector Rocco Ferrando dreams at all, he dreams of paper: stacks of it blowing through his slumberland, beautiful squalls of pristine pages to which he gives order and meaning. Ever since the higher-ups realized Ferrando was the only officer in San Lorenzo with a good grasp of spelling and grammar, he has been the desk-bound originator of all police paperwork. Clerical work is his calling." (p. 157).
Though his creatively drafted police reports are celebrated by his superiors, Rocco Ferrando, the man, is considered a buffoon by his subordinates, incapable of resolving the most open-and-shut case without resorting to manufactured evidence and invented witnesses. (p. 160).
He also a fan of Sherlock Holmes novels
Sherlock Holmes is the Galileo of the left-handed human heart, trading the telescope for a magnifying glass to discern the order within the nearer darkness. In his company, Ferrando can imagine a world where an inspector is the restorer of justice rather than another instrument of its impoverishment. (p. 159).
He also has a cat, who burned down his house, but when Nino escapes, he smiles and waves as Nino sails away. He also files a false police report that a shot was fired, Nino was hit and presumably drowned.
Cast of characters
Giovanni Bellino is Ferrando's sergeant
Elisabetta Bellino is the madam running the local brothel, where Rocco Ferrando ultimately dies.
Cast of characters—Nino Picone (Vincent Cortese)
Young man Giuseppe, Maria's father, takes in because he wants to learn photography, starting with photos for visas. Giuseppe is in "confino" in San Lorenzo but plans to escape.
Vincenzo Cortese is going to steal one of the German black Mercedes parked behind the San Lorenzo carabineri police station, but he is discovered, shot, and killed. Nino takes his papers and escapes, becoming Vincent Cortese when he reaches LA, crossing the US as an itinerant photographer, until he meets Maria. She gets him a job at Mercury Pictures, although she blames him for bungling her father's escape.
He's good at faking wartime battle scenes on the backlot, photographs the destruction of re-constructed Berlin at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and ultimately photographs the American liberation of Italy at the end of the war, taking him back to San Lorenzo.
Cast of characters—Nino Picone (Vincent Cortese)
There his fake identity as Vincent Cortese is challenged when army officers take him to Concetta Corteze, who acknowledges him as her son although she knows that her real son died in the escape plan devised by Giuseppe and Nino. Nino promises to take care of her.
When he's back in LA, her buys a house for her, puts it in her name, so that she will be able to have a garden. He writes a letter telling her of this and finally mails it at the very end of the novel. It's his reparation.
Cast of characters—Anna Weber, miniaturist
Anna Weber is the skilled miniaturist who creates the scale model of Mercury Pictures, including the back lot, sound stages and facilities building. It is a faithful replica. She has ambitions to be an architect, a career not permitted for women in a male-dominated profession, either in her native Berlin or in Hollywood. In this, she is like Maria.
But she is employed by the Army to recreate the Berlin neighborhood she grew up in at Dugway, with absolute accuracy in the details.
Originally employed as a steno in an architectural firm in Berlin, her talent creating miniatures led to a job with UFA, the German film conglomerate. There she met and married Hasso Beck, "a brash young director with unctuous hair and a fur-collared overcoat who invited her dancing. It wasn’t the thrill of seeing herself on the director’s arm, nor the satisfaction of feeling chosen over all those aspiring ingénues, but Hasso’s malleability, his putty-like capacity to mold himself to the requirements of a situation," that attracted her. They had a son Kurt and Hasso's lack of parental interest meant that Kurt "was hers, hers alone, and that she would not fail him as her parents had failed her."
In LA, she lives in a Santa Monica bungalow with Rudi Bloch
Cast of characters—Anna Weber, miniaturist
Hasso joins the Fascist party and offers her a position as an architect with a friend's firm if she will join the party as well. She says "no," and leaves the marriage. Her friend Walter Gelb, Jewish, and an architect, offers to marry her so that he can transfer his holdings to an "Aryan" wife. Hasso finds out and takes full custody of their son Kurt.
He's lost to her forever. And as much as she missed Kurt, she missed the person she had been when she was his mother.
He had a favorite tortoise and they had decorated his shell with rhinestones, but when she escapes, she substitutes diamonds, and passes easily through customs.
In LA, as Nino is searching through German propaganda films, she ask him to find her son. Ultimately he does and leaves a photo for her at the Dugway site when he leaves. Initially she doesn't open it, and does so only when she takes up residence in the buildings just before they will be bombed.
Seeing the photo, she tries to speak. "There is something she must tell Kurt before the blockbusters wrench the breath from her body. Dark wings span the moonless sky. The B-17s pass one angel overhead. “It’s me,” she says. “It’s me. I’m here.” (p. 477)
Questions for discussion
One of the primary themes in this novel is the contrast between reality (as it really occurred) and reality fictionalized, as it is in films. Where/how is reality fictionalized in the plot of this novel?
The Devil's Bargain and Goethe's Faust
The Devil's Bargain, a movie introduced at the beginning of the novel, violates the production code enforced by Joseph Breen and is the reason Artie is summoned to Washington. It's based on Goethe's Faust, a story about a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for power, riches, and glory. The story is based on a medieval legend.
According to the BBC, "The legend seems to have particular resonance at times of moral crisis. Mephisto (1936), a novel by Klaus Mann, offers a thinly-veiled portrait of an actor who ingratiates himself with the Nazi regime in order to advance his career. This ‘devils-bargain’ (teufelspakt) helps him become Germany’s most celebrated actor, but when he plays Mephistopheles in a production of Faust, he realizes that he is acting the wrong part – he has become Faust, morally compromised with evil."
Who makes Faustian bargains in this novel?
Structure of the story
The novel is structured into two parts with two storylines—one in Italy, one in Hollywood. And there are time differences—15 years or more between the characters' early lives before immigration, and then after.
How well do you think the novel holds together to merge two countries and two time periods?
Questions for discussion
Themes of exile and imprisonment recur throughout the novel. How do different characters experience exile, both at home and abroad? How are invisible prisons different from real ones?
Questions for discussion
While Giuseppe writes to Maria, his letters are redacted by censors, portions cut out before they're sent to Maria. Her father has kept these remnants of his letter, in a cigar box he sends with Nino/Vincent. Maria tries to paste these parts back into the original letters.
What's the significance of this theme?
Questions for discussion—1
There are several scenes of "living space" in this novel, beginning with the miniature of Mercury Pictures. For example, when Vincent (Nino) first comes to Hollywood, Maria takes him on a tour of the movie sets on the back lot:
He followed Maria past the Jungle Forest into a piazza paved in ersatz travertine that held the cream-colored haloes of streetlamps. He felt like an explorer stumbling into the magnificent ruins of a lost civilization rearing up from the wilderness. Curated storefronts displayed an assortment of unseasonable dresses and inaccurately priced shoes. Italian-language signage emblazoned the window glass in boldface fonts. Mounted to the clay-tiled roofs, a hidden scaffolding held immense blackout screens that rolled out to allow day-for-night shooting.
Café tables sat empty under a white-and-yellow awning, a chair leg steadied by a matchbook, a stack of menus at the maître d’s stand. Unadorned by posters or sloganeering or Mussolini’s watchful gaze, the piazza re-created no Italy he recognized. Perhaps these inaccuracies were a form of flawlessness, Vincent thought, not errors but imprints of possibility. Perhaps that accounted for the sense of homecoming he encountered in this distant suburb of his extinct world.
Questions for discussion—2
She opened the door of one of the false fronts. They walked down the narrow plywood corridor running behind the façades to provide passage for set dressers. At the end of the corridor, there was a little room with bare walls, a secretary desk, and a stopped clock.
“This was my first office,” Maria said. Years ago, when she lobbied for an office of her own, one of Artie’s underlings had given her this hideaway that crews used for poker games, naps, and assignations. It had been furnished with a card table, a couch, and a couple thousand peanut shells. Cheesecake pinups plastered every inch of wall, running ten, twenty deep. A geology of bared legs and pouty lip.
No matter that she was the first in, last out, and least paid, no matter her industry or talent, to the front-office boys club this was her place, this grubby room where middle-aged louts graded the busts of teenagers. Maria had considered quitting then and there.
Instead, she came in alone one weekend to renovate the bachelor’s pad.
Questions for discussion—3
She borrowed a paint scraper from the carpentry shop and peeled the strata of sleaze until she reached bare wall. She swept and scoured the floorboards. Shook salt in the corners to dispel the evil spirits. Helped herself to the desk chair, wall clock, and liquor cabinet of the flunky who’d assigned her this “office.” She made the room her own and then padlocked the door in case the prior tenants were tempted to return.
Even now that she had a legitimate office, this remained the only space in the studio she imagined was hers. (pp. 231-233)
What other rooms are featured in this novel?
Questions for discussion
Another of the themes in this novel is immigration and "enemy aliens."
What does Marra say about immigrants in the US?
Questions for discussion
Easily, another of the dominant themes focuses on perspective, beginning of course with the description of the studio miniature early in the novel.