Tea Obreht
Set against the backdrop of war in the Balkans, The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht tells the story of Natalia, a young doctor delivering much needed medicine to children across a war-torn border. During her trip, she learns her grandfather, a physician with whom she had a very close relationship, has died under mysterious circumstances. Natalia determines to discover the circumstances of her grandfather’s death.
The novel unfolds in a series of flashbacks of Natalia with her grandfather, their frequent visits to the zoo to see the tiger, and her grandfather reading to her from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which was always in his possession. Natalia intersperses these childhood flashbacks with fantastical stories her grandfather told her, specifically, his recurring encounters with the “deathless man;” and his childhood recollection of a deaf-mute women who befriended an escaped zoo tiger during World War II. The disparate threads weave in and out throughout the novel, overlapping and shifting between multiple timelines while blending a realistic description of Natalia’s journey through a war-torn country. The elements of magical realism are provided by her grandfather’s folk tales.
The novel illustrates how a people, traumatized by war, cope with loss, grief, and destruction. They tell stories taken from their rich mythology and folklore, perform superstitious acts to ward off evil, and fabricate stories of the devil to explain mysterious happenings. By juxtaposing characters from folklore with realistically drawn figures from the village, Obreht blurs the line between reality and fiction to portray a people traumatized by war desperately adhering to their cultural traditions, including those of honoring the dead.
Obreht doesn’t tie up the different threads in a neat little bow at the novel’s conclusion. Instead, she leaves some of them open-ended and intentionally ambiguous since, just as is true in life, we may never get definite answers to the questions we seek because some questions are unanswerable.
An ambitious debut novel, reflecting a maturity and execution unusual for such a young author.