Tiger's Wife - spoilers allowed

[Nadine in California]

This is the place for questions or comments that are too revealing ;)

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)]

Hello everyone! I finished The Tiger's Wife a few days ago and have mixed feelings about it. On the on hand I loved Obreht's writing, on the other I think that Natalia should have been given more room on the page.

[Nadine in California]

Anna Luce wrote: "Hello everyone! I finished The Tiger's Wife a few days ago and have mixed feelings about it. On the on hand I loved Obreht's writing, on the other I think that Natalia should have been given more r..."

Yes, I agree. Although I found the fable stories more interesting than Natalia, I think more of Natalia would have made her more interesting to me. Especially if the fables had started appearing earlier in the book.

[Mike]

Overall I really liked the writing but my immediate feeling upon finishing the book yesterday was that the story felt ‘incomplete.’ I don’t necessarily desire closure for all facets of a story, but leaving untold how Luka, the Tiger and the Tiger’s wife all died leaves too much open-ended. Did the apothecary mix a deadly potion? Where was midwife Mother Vera when the time for birth was imminent?

I don’t recall ever reading The Jungle Book. Do the fables in The Tiger’s Wife parallel some of the stories from The Jungle Book?

[Mark]

Oh Mike, Obreht answered all of those. SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER (view spoiler)[As I see it, Luka had his head blown off by the tiger's wife, the tiger (tiger 1?) vanished, while the tiger Natalia and her grandfather visited (tiger 2?) was euthanized/shot during the most recent bombardment, and the tiger's wife was poisoned by the apothecary through the innocent actions of the grandfather, who also was the innocent nexus of Dariša's death (both murders at the age of nine!). (hide spoiler)]
I wonder if tiger 1 and tiger 2 are the same tiger, though I doubt it. I'm sure that the tuft of tiger fur Natalia gets at the end is from tiger 1, saved out from The Jungle Book when he gave it to Gavran Gailé at his death.

I also LOVE the uncanny chase in the chapter "The River." The track she follows the grave robber along morphs from a road, to a river, and back again as it threads through the ghost town. I'm unclear about exactly who the man she is following is. She is certain at one point that it is the deathless man, but he refers a bit later to his wife and dead son. Anyone?

Finally, Mike, you really should read The Jungle Book! There's a reason it is a classic. DO NOT watch the Disney movie instead.

[Nadine in California]

I love the unexplained uncanny in fiction, and I don't know what kind of literary magic it takes to make it work, but this book has it for me. I put the Tiger into the same category as the Deathless Man (well, ageless, not deathless) - it's something that can't be true, but still exists. A paradox. Life is made up of stories within stories that are told and retold so many times, that truth has long since gotten lost.

"...many people telling you the story couldn't have been alive when it happened, and then it becomes clear that they have all been telling each other different stories, too."

[Vesna]

It's been a while since I read this book but I remember that I absolutely loved how Obreht dealt with the themes of war and people's search for life's meaning while constantly haunted by death in senseless times. And that it's such a constant in this region that all generations have to deal with it. The two main periods in the novel were the most recent wars (1990s) when Natalia visits her homeland as a young doctor and learns about her beloved grandfather's death, and the WWII of her grandfather's youth. That's when myths and superstitions are more comforting than rationality, at least in the areas such as the Balkans.

As for the individual characters and "plot," I felt that Obreht gave us a sort of navigating guideline through many layers in her novel in this early quote (I found the bookmark still on this page):

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger's wife, and the story of the deathless man. These two stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life -- my grandfather's days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, of which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

All the same, I felt that not everything was connected well in the end. While I'm fine with it in general, I think that it should be somewhat clearer why the novel is titled after the tiger's wife. I am probably wrong but I interpreted her as someone who is different from the others and "rescued" by "the hero" tiger in her grandfather's childhood imagination as he later did marry someone who was "different" from others in their environment and yet a loving person (she is clear that her grandmother was a Muslim married into a Christian family). This could be a more political interpretation, but given the overall setting of wars and the quoted passage, I thought it was a possibility.

That said, I found even more interesting what the Deathless Man was bringing to the novel...

[Nadine in California]

Vesna wrote: "It's been a while since I read this book but I remember that I absolutely loved how Obreht dealt with the themes of war and people's search for life's meaning while constantly haunted by death in s..."

Yes, I see what you mean, and I wondered about the title too. From your quote, I can see how the story of the Tiger's Wife shaped him as a man, but not how the Deathless Man made him a child again. Maybe because it stripped him of his arrogance about his medical skills in the face of so much death?

[Vesna]

That's a good question, Nadine, and I like your interpretation. The way I experienced the Deathless Man is on two levels. First, it could be about the ever-present death brought by recurrent wars. On the other level, the encounters between her grandfather and the Deathless Man might also metaphorically present the struggle between saving and healing lives, which was her grandfather's job, and the death taking them away. It is in this second sense that I think your interpretation really helps explain what Obreht says about "how he became a child again."

I still can't figure out though why the tiger's wife is chosen for the novel's title... If anything, it's Natalia's grandfather who is the emotional core of the novel.

[Mike]

I'm unclear about exactly who the man she is following is.."

Mark, I thought the man she was following in 'The River' chapter was possibly Barba Ivan, the vineyard owner. Fra Antun tells Natalia the loss of his 15-year old brother Arlo (owner of the dog Bis everyone paints) has been hard on his mother Nada as he leads her to the shrine.