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Tiger's Wife - no spoilers
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I love Obreht's writing here! From the first line, it's like slowly opening a babushka doll, with layers within layers: connected but always surprising.
Mark wrote: "I love Obreht's writing here! From the first line, it's like slowly opening a babushka doll, with layers within layers: connected but always surprising."I agree . For me, the writing has a kind of timelessness that fits the culture - it's not exactly formal since it's simple and direct, but it also doesn't carry any whiff of the late 20th century. It works no matter what time period the story bounces between. It also fits the 'place' (an unnamed Yugoslavia/Serbia/Belgrade) with its ancient buildings that have been repurposed or are in various stages of decay. The past is always present in this book.
Finished the book last night. For the first half of the book, I liked it in a moderate kind of way, but became much more enthusiastic in the second half, when the folktale element took over more of the book. I think if the folk tales had been more evenly woven into the book it would have been a 5 star, rather than a 4 star book for me. I wondered who the Tiger's Wife was for too long.
I think Obreht has a wonderful way with characters. I can not only picture the grandfather in detail, I feel like I've actually met him. I also love the way we learn about his life in a non-linear way. Any other favorite characters out there?
Here's a capsule of Obreht's writing, "The Musket", from chapter 4, that shows how she builds layers of history into each element of the story. (sorry if the quote's too long) Ending with a sheep rapist!:There was only one gun in the village, and, for many years, it had been kept in the family home of the blacksmith. It was an old Ottoman musket and it had a long, sharp muzzle, like a pike, and a silver-mantled barrel with a miniature Turkish cavalry carved riding forward over the saddle below the sight. A faded, woolly tassel hung from an embroidered cord over the musket butt, which was a deep, oily mahogany, and rough along the side, where the name of the Turk who had first carried it had been thoughtfully scraped off.
The musket had made its way to the village through a series of exchanges that differed almost every time someone told the story, and went back nearly two centuries. It had supposedly first seen battle at Lastica, before disappearing in the mule-pack of a defecting Janissary from the sultan's personal bodyguard, a soldier-turned-peddler who carried it with him for many decades while he roamed the mountains, selling silks and cook pots and exotic oils. The musket was eventually stolen from the Janissary peddler by a Magyar highwayman, and, later still, dragged out from under the Magyar's body by the mounted brigade that shot him down outside the house of his mistress, whose blouse, wet with the highwayman's blood, was still unbuttoned when she begged the brigadiers to leave her the gun as they took her lover's corpse away. The highwayman's mistress mounted the gun above the counter in her tavern. She dressed in mourning, and developed a habit of cleaning the gun as though it were in use. Many years later, an old woman of sixty, she gave it to the boy who carried milk up the stairs for her, so it would protect him when he rode against the bey's citadel in an ill-fated uprising that was swiftly crushed. The boy's head ended up on a pike on the citadel wall, and the gun ended up in the possession of the bey, who hung it in a minor trophy room of his winter palace, between the heads of two leopards with crooked eyes. It stayed there for almost sixty years, through the reigns of three beys, hanging opposite a stuffed lynx—and then, as time passed, a sultan's last battle outfit, the carriage of a Russian queen, a silver tea-set honoring one alliance or another, and eventually a state car belonging to a wealthy Turk who, shortly before his execution, had forfeited all his possessions to the citadel.
When the citadel fell, shortly after the turn of the century, the gun was taken away by a looter from Kovae, who carried it with him while he went from town to town, selling coffee. In the end, switching hands in some skirmish between peasants and Turkish militia, the musket went home with one of the survivors, a youth from the village, the grandfather of the blacksmith. That was 1901. Since then, the gun had hung on the wall above the blacksmith's hearth. It had been fired only once, in the direction of a sheep rapist, and never by the blacksmith himself. Now, my grandfather learned, the old gun would be used to kill the tiger.
This quote, about the start of the bombing in The City, reminds me of the way Americans who aren't living in a hard-hit community (yet) are reacting to the virus (encouraged by ignorant and inept leaders):"All of it was going on outside, somehow, even when the sound of the bombs hitting started coming in through the open windows, and even when you went outside, you could tell yourself it was some kind of crazy construction accident, that the car, flung seventy-five feet into the facade of a brick building, was just some kind of terrible joke."
Mark wrote: "Here's a capsule of Obreht's writing, "The Musket", from chapter 4, that shows how she builds layers of history into each element of the story. (sorry if the quote's too long) Ending with a sheep r..."Yes - I had marked this entire passage too - it's a good thing I don't underline in my books because this one would be a mess. In most other books I can cite a few sentences, or a paragraph to show examples of great writing, but Obreht's writing is such a tapestry you have to cite whole pages.
This is the place for discussion of whole or parts of the book without giving away major plot points. I'm 2/3's through, and it doesn't seem like plot is the driving force of the book, so I think most discussion may take place here.