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The Tiger's Wife

Téa Obreht

Start date: February 1, 2012

Finish date: February 29, 2012

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Apr 28, 2011 Mary rated it liked it · review of another edition

Obreht begins her novel by laying out the special relationship that exists between narrator Natalia and her grandfather. One of the traditions they shared, upset by the onset of war in the Balkans, was a weekly visit to the zoo. In those days before the war, they would bring along bags of wilted vegetables for the animals and “[i]n his pocket my grandafather has hidden some sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the park carriage. I will not remember this as sentimentality, but as greatness.” And r Obreht begins her novel by laying out the special relationship that exists between narrator Natalia and her grandfather. One of the traditions they shared, upset by the onset of war in the Balkans, was a weekly visit to the zoo. In those days before the war, they would bring along bags of wilted vegetables for the animals and “[i]n his pocket my grandafather has hidden some sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the park carriage. I will not remember this as sentimentality, but as greatness.” And remembering is all Natalia has left to her: her grandfather has just died.

The grandfather died in a clinic far from home. His body has been delivered back to the city where he and Natalia lived but his personal effects are missing. Natalia’s grandmother begs her to find the missing items, without which the necessary forty days of mourning cannot be concluded successfully. Natalia, a doctor like her grandfather and a Serbian, is just setting out on a goodwill mission to inoculate orphans in a town formerly battered by the Serbian paramilitary. She uses the trip as a cover to seek out the truth behind her grandfather’s death and the location of his belongings. She wants most of all to recover his tattered copy of The Jungle Book by Kipling. Her grandfather always carried the book with him, even after pledging it as payment in a bet made with a most formidable opponent.

This is a novel of many stories: Natalia and her goodwill mission; her grandfather’s training as a doctor, including his youthful wager on which he bet his beloved Jungle Book; her grandfather’s childhood encounter with the wife of a tiger; and including the histories of the butcher; the apothecary; the Tiger’s wife; the Deathless man and the woman he fell in love with; the family of Fra Autun and their much-painted dog; and Duré’s vineyard-digging family. With writing that is beautiful, construction that is patient, and a conclusion that is breathtaking in its entirety — Obreht brings every story together seamlessly — Obreht illuminates vital truths about why we are who we are and how we are who we are. It is not by our name — Muslim or Christian, upcountry or down — that we are defined, it is by our experiences of touch and smell, of chance and fate, of love and loss, and of peace and war.

The Tiger’s Wife is not only a chilling and exacting depiction of the war in the Balkans but also a stunning presentation of both the sorrows and the joys of survival. Her portraits of all the lives contained within her novel are as startling and mesmerizing as the portraits painted by Rembrandt, those in which you see the complete story of the painted subject’s life within the ridges and shadows of his face. That such a young woman could write such an insightful book can only be explained by Obreht having listened, really listened, to all the stories she’s ever been told or read, and by her having absorbed, through reading and listening and thinking, truths that pass down through generations.

The truths Obreht illustrates in The Tiger’s Wife are found at the intersection of reality and superstition, spirituality and practicality, and needing and giving. The final yearnings of the tiger — for the touch and the smell of love — is at the heart of all our desires. And “[i]n the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.” The memories that survive after you have been put in the ground are then passed on, stories to feed the future. How lucky we are to have the beauty of Obreht’s writing to illuminate the past and bring hope for the future. ...more

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