The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht

Too long between blogs, friends! Life became consuming - I've also nearly finished The Forrests, and am now digesting it ... today I'll recommence with a relatively short blog about a wonderful book I also read fairly recently. Winner of the Orange prize for Fiction in 2011, Tea Obreht's book kept asking me to read it, with its effective cover, like a lino or woodcut print, of a woman embracing a tiger. That the author is young and this is her debut novel is of course sobering since the book is utterly magical and beautifully written. I can't imagine many young writers being able to produce this work. Set in the Balkans following conflict - during wartime and after it, and also moving between periods of time using very interesting narrative modes - The Tiger's Wife unravels myths and legends about a tiger who lives with a woman on the edges of town, becoming her lover. Her own history is a dark and secret tale, but only one of many in the book. The main narrator is a doctor, Natalia, tending to communities of ill and wounded, and to children, during wartime. She remembers stories about her recently deceased grandfather - he dies during the story - and his tales of meeting a curious 'deathless' man who reappeared at intervals during his life, edging him, possibly, closer to knowing his own end. Obreht has such control over these multiple stories, layers of myths, legends, characters peopling the stories, and also over language itself that I was totally in awe of her skill.

I fell in love with this book, kept eking it out so I did not have to say goodbye to it. Revisiting it now for the blog makes me find it again. I suppose I found resonance in it about history - my own craft and subject - and about twentieth century war and conflict, the disputes across ethnic and religious lines and social divisions which are more than repugnant - they are simply horrendous. Natalia must deal with this too. To soften the political edges of this story, Obreht uses magic realism. We are never quite sure where we are in time or place - so much so that one bookstore person I was chatting to said this was one drawback of the book for her. But for me, this was a useful device. We can see Bosnia-Herzegovina, this recent tragic conflict in our own times, and link it to Europe's dark history, the 'dark continent', to borrow from historian Mark Mazower http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/67. You can see from Obreht's biography her own personal history woven into this work, too. See: http://www.teaobreht.com/biography.html This is, then, a powerful, engaging and fully-charged story with much beauty and many significant interludes within it. I was journeying through this book in ways which made the political and drier historical work about our own times come to life, breathing.

Read! Read! Read!