The Tiger's Wife: A Review

Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday. The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the award, praised Mo's "hallucinatory realism," saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." If that sounds similar to the writings of the South American "magical realism school" like Gabriel García Márquez, it probably should. What it really sounds like is Tea Obreht, originally Tea Bajraktarević,  an American novelist of Bosniak/Slovene descent, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, now Serbia.

Miss Obreht  is the author of a number of well regarded short stories and the more recent novel, "The Tiger's Wife", and her reviews are cautious. The caution is understandable. First she is young--in her twenties--and no reviewer wants to go overboard. Second, the author is beautiful and thus immediately suspect for, as everyone knows, brains eat beauty and the two cannot coexist; no one is crass or nonintellectual enough to note it, however,  and the reviewers all walk around this as if she had a prosthesis. (Although now, with the writer Shani Boianjiu, who wrote "The People of Forever are not Afraid",  a whole new field may open of vibrant, creative, Hellenic intellectuals with a pulse). Third, everyone is scared witless of her; this is her first novel, it is extremely good and no one wants to be on the wrong side of success.

The main character is a young physician, the granddaughter of a physician, and the basic story involves her relationship with her grandfather and her travels to deliver medicine to an orphanage, all against the backdrop of a recently resolved civil war. While the geography is never specific, these are people and places where the past is very important. Within this story are other stories--mythological and strange--which appear and merge with the present reality or appear as memory. The present, the past, folk stories, magic, superstition and mythology all swim in and out of each others streams. The principle stories are of the tiger's wife--a woman believed to have personal relationship with a tiger-- and "the deathless man"--a man cursed with immortality.  “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” the lead character says, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life." The first story is responsible for his maturity, the second for his return to his innocence.

This mythology, this fantastic vision, runs through everyone in the story to some degree or another as the story moves through perceptions and times. Obreht's talent is to make the real people and times firm enough that the fantastic seems to grow from them naturally yet neither restricts the other. She moves smoothly from one time to another, from the concrete to the fantastic. The magical of life stimulate the absurd but Obreht uses the absurd to reveal the fantastic. The grandfather discovers an elephant loose in the city and the two follow it through the streets. As they do the grandfather surrenders to the circumstances and decides to tell her about the deathless man, a story he has long and jealously guarded. And she is funny. A poetic parrot with an evangelical bent, a man named "the-unhoped-for-one", raiders "with a willful attempt to forestall security"--this wryness gives credence to her more magical topics.

This is not a book without problems. These threads are a lot to handle. There are significant plotting errors buried in the magic, sometimes the time shifts are awkward and she can be cute. But for those of us trying to recover from our only knowledge of the Balkans in "Balkan Ghosts", this is a wonderful and hopeful addition.