While Marra admires the films of Hollywood’s golden era-he’s a fan of screwball comedies in particular-he’s also attentive, in Mercury Pictures Presents, to the industry’s cruelty and unsavory politics. “It takes as much ink to put a man on the moon as it does it put a roast in the oven,” he says. Ultimately, though, Marra finds in prose a budget-free liberty-to shift between perspectives, to shuffle through settings and historical periods-that’s harder to come by in film. One chapter focusing on a police detective in Southern Italy takes inspiration from the noir films of the period, and the dialogue between Maria and her boss borrows its “guff,” as Marra puts it, from the crackling exchanges between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Immersing himself in film alerted Marra to the resonances and distinctions between cinematic and literary narrative. “Maybe that’s why it took me so long to write this one.” “One of the nice things about writing a novel set in the movie world is that you can technically call sitting on the couch watching movies research,” he says. Marra also, naturally, watched a lot of films. He discovered a problem with writing about WWII and Hollywood: “There’s a never-ending rabbit hole of research you can go down,” he says, “in a way that, when you’re writing about Chechnya, there isn’t.” He traveled to the Calabria region of Italy, one of the novel’s key settings spent four months at the American Academy in Berlin learning about the Weimar years and the experiences of German exiles drew on the expertise of his wife, Kappy Mintie, an art historian, for details about photographic technology and filled “several bookshelves’ worth of books” on Italy and the film industry. Nevertheless, the research skills Marra honed while writing his first two books proved instrumental as he filled out the novel’s world. “After doing two books set in the former U.S.S.R.,” he says, “I felt that I was ready to come a bit closer to home.” For this novel, he took inspiration more immediately from his own time living in California and from his ancestors’ roots in Southern Italy. In his previous works, he drew on his time studying abroad in Prague and St. While Mercury Pictures Presents shares in that ambition, it also marks something of a departure for Marra, or rather a homecoming. The book’s array of perspectives and leaps across space and time are so kaleidoscopic that Dwight Garner, reviewing the book fondly in the New York Times, called describing its plot a “grim labor.” The Tsar of Love and Techno is no less free-ranging, with stories that move from Russia and Chechnya to Siberia, and that span 1937 to the present day. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and New York magazine, tracks various characters navigating geopolitical conflict in Chechnya. The novel’s crowdedness and sweeping scope will be familiar to Marra’s readers. government and Maria’s Chinese American boyfriend, Eddie, whose formidable acting talent finds no outlet in an industry bent on racial typecasting. The cast is as wide and varied as a golden age epic: the novel touches on Maria’s childhood in Italy, her father’s internal exile at the hands of the country’s fascist government, and the experiences of Hollywood’s myriad emigres and misfits, including a German woman who presses her skills as a miniaturist into the service of the U.S. The novel is set largely in World War II–era Hollywood and focuses on Maria Lagana, a young movie producer from Italy, and her boss, Artie Feldman, as they try to keep the studio of the book’s title afloat during a period of world-historical chaos. Mercury Pictures Presents certainly took Marra, 37, far away from his own life. Eventually, after struggling to synthesize his wide-ranging ideas for the novel, “I finally felt like I could see how these elements fit together,” he adds. “One of the things I always value most in fiction is that feeling of being transported somewhere far from you,” Marra says. The second was the sheer restlessness of isolation. “I realized I would really thrive in a surveillance state.” From her workspace at the kitchen table, Marra’s wife “could see directly into my writing closet,” he says. The first was the accountability that comes when two spouses are both working from home. When the pandemic hit, it gave Marra two sources of motivation.
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