2022/104: The Tiger's Wife — Tea Obreht

When your fight has purpose — to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent — it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling — when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event — there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. [loc. 4056]

Natalia is a young doctor, travelling with her childhood friend Zora across a new border to administer vaccines to orphans created by the recent war. En route, she learns of her grandfather's death: not unexpected, as she was one of the few who knew he had cancer, but mysterious because he'd claimed to be on his way to visit her, but died in a remote village that neither she nor her grandmother has ever heard of. As she pieces together the truth of his death, she recalls the tales he told her, of the deathless man and of the tiger's wife. Meanwhile, in the village where she and Zora are staying, a group of travellers are digging busily in the vineyard for the bones of a cousin left buried there during the war: “Doesn’t like it here, and he’s making us sick. When we find him we’ll be on our way.” [loc. 1333].

The Tiger's Wife is a fable about war, death, superstition and reparation. The chapters each tell a different story, past and present: the grandfather's childhood in the small village of Galina, and the tiger that escaped from the city zoo and came to live in the forest nearby; the deathless man, who claimed to be Death's nephew and proved his immortality not once but several times; the resistance of the gypsies to modern medicine; the legacy of centuries of war, from Ottoman incursions to the civil war that divided the country; the marriage of Luka, the butcher of Galina, to a deaf-mute Muslim girl. Kipling's Jungle Book is a durable connection between Natalia and her grandfather, between the tiger ('it's Shere Khan!') and the deathless man: in a sense this is a novel about stories and how they shape lives as much as, if not more than, the plain facts upon which fables are built.

This is Serbian-American author Tea Obreht's first novel, published when she was just 24. I loved the prose and the vivid imagery, and the zoo animals' pitiable experience of war: the grandfather's tales of his youth, and his memories of the people he knew, felt more rounded and more real than Natalia's occasionally tepid narrative. There are elements of magic realism, and the names and geographies are invented: but this novel is firmly rooted in the history and culture of the former Yugoslavia.