Featured Book: The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352 pages
Published: March 2011

The Tiger's Wife is a striped book -- appropriate enough, given its title. Its stripes are the stories contained therein, layered on top of each other, orange over black, black over orange. Set in an unnamed Balkan country during an unnamed war (which resembles the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-1995), there are really three narratives, a trifecta that does, for the most part, come together to form a whole. The first narrative is that of Natalia, a young doctor from a family of doctors, traveling to deliver vaccines to an orphrnate near a village that does not welcome her. The second narrative is that of her recently deceased grandfather, and his encounters with a man who could not die. The third narrative is another piece of her grandfather's history, about how, when hew as a boy growing up in the village of Galina, a tiger escaped from a zoo and terrorized the townsfolk.

I've read an interview with Obreht (who, by the way, is only 26) where she remarked that the novel is a story about doctors and death. I see what she means. Death and war bracket the novel -- large parts of the story are told during war or in the aftermath of war. And yes, all of the narratives are, in a sense, about dying, and about bodies, and about how people process death. The doctor part is interesting too, because all the doctor characters strive against death, fighting it with all the weapons in their arsenal, and yet they know death better than anyone. It can come at the end of a soldier's rifle or the swipe of a tiger's claw.

I have heard complaints that the novel is too opaque and that moving between the three stories never gives the reader a sense of the whole. In some parts, I think, this is true. The ending for me was not as smoothly transitional as the beginning, and I think that in the telling of history, of people's stories, we could have stood to hear more from Natalia. So much of the book is focused on her grandfather's history, that I think she has more to tell us, as a girl who has grown up during war.

These are small complaints, however. The Tiger's Wife is an enigmatic, elegant novel by a ferociously talented young writer. I look forward to whatever Obreht writes next.

- N.S