Book Review: The Tiger's Wife

“Deftly walks the line between the realistic and the fantastical…In Obreht’s expert hands, the novel’s mythology, while rooted in a foreign world, comes to seem somehow familiar, like the dark fairy tales of our own youth, the kind that spooked us into reading them again and again…[Reveals] oddly comforting truths about death, belief in the impossible, and the art of letting go.” – O: The Oprah Magazine

In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

But Natalia is also confronting a private, hurtful mystery of her own: the inexplicable circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. After telling her grandmother that he was on his way to meet Natalia, he instead set off for a ramshackle settlement none of their family had ever heard of and died there alone. A famed physician, her grandfather must have known that he was too ill to travel. Why he left home becomes a riddle Natalia is compelled to unravel. 

Grief struck and searching for clues to her grandfather’s final state of mind, she turns to the stories he told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age. But the most extraordinary story of all is the one her grandfather never told her, the one Natalia must discover for herself. One winter during the Second World War, his childhood village was snowbound, cut off even from the encroaching German invaders but haunted by another, fierce presence: a tiger who comes ever closer under cover of darkness. “These stories,” Natalia comes to understand, “run like secret rivers through all the other stories” of her grandfather’s life. And it is ultimately within these rich, luminous narratives that she will find the answer she is looking for. (From Tea Obreht)

 Ages: 17+

Rated: I don't even know how to rate this, it is most definately a book that will be enjoyed more by adults than anyone younger than a late teen. Themes and issues deal with life, death, war, grief, mythology and family.

I will start this review with a recognition, this will be the first clearly adult book that I have written a review for. That is not to say that I do not regularly read books that are not YA themed, I most assuredly do, but I usually have to sit and digest books like this for quite a while, let my thoughts and understandings percolate and sift through my head for at least a few weeks. It has taken me over two months to think about this book before I can I was able to talk about this book beyond merely stating how absolutely amazingly beautiful this book was to read.

I read the Tiger's Wife on the heels of finishing up Secret Daughter, and was feeling understandably moody and weird. Secret Daughter is a very good book, but it left me feeling off. I immediately picked up Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obrecht, and was transported into a beautifully exotic world that I had first discovered as a child reading Zlata's Diary, and more recently in The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (which admittedly, I need to finish). A world that is more than a little broken by war, a little broken by cultural clashing, a little broken by history, but yet a world filled with love, hope, and mystery of a world not completely discovered.

Obreht does a beautiful job of intertwining three main stories together through the Tiger's Wife. The first is the story of Natalia, the young doctor looking for meaning relating to the death of her grandfather, told to us in the stories that he had passed down to her in her youth, and stories that she is trying to piece together into an almost autobiographical recounting of the amazing happenstances that her grandfather lived through, turning his life into a spectacular fable that leaves you breathless with awe and wonder. (Do you see what I mean? I keep on gushing.). The first story that Natalia recounts is the one of Gavran Gailé, the "deathless man" that her grandfather sometimes encountered, who collected the souls of the dead. The second story concerns a tiger that escaped from a zoo in World War II, making its careful way to a small village in the mountains that her Grandfather lived in as a small child. Prejudice, fear, and ignorance shape the dealings of the villagers with the tiger, and the young deaf-mute girl that it seemingly befriends.

All three stories are told in a disjointed manner, jumping from the present to the past as easily as we turn the page. Even the stories themselves, as recounted by Natalia, are not told in a consecutive manner. Sometimes she goes back and tells stories that take place before her grandfather's life fable. I say fable because it is so clearly and awesomely fantastical. Stories that Natalia couldn't possibly know, but that fit snugly into the holes that she is trying to fill in. Her grandfather as a child, enraptured by the Tiger come to life from the pages of the Jungle Book, her grand father as a doctor during yet another, earlier war, meeting a man who attracts calamity and death just as he he continues to fail at attracting his own death, her grandfather as an old man telling her his stories, her grandfather as a dead man who has left the final story unfinished.

The Tiger’s Wife never lets us forget that stories have the ability to transcend all manner of reality, whether it teeters on depression or reaches ecstatic heights. Like any good sorcerer, the spell Obreht casts is strong enough to circumvent flaws, and to invite the reader to hope she’ll continue honing her literary magic with even greater depth and care. (From The National Post).

I hope that is clear that this is a story that I am still thinking about. A story that I am still trying to understand. And ultimately, it is a story that I am talking about. The Tiger's Wife is a beautiful read. I hope it takes you on a beautiful journey.

Grade: A+