The Tiger's Wife: Summary and book reviews of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, plus links to an excerpt from The Tiger's Wife and a biography of Téa Obreht.
The Tiger's Wife A Novel
by Téa Obreht
Hardcover: Mar 2011,
352 pages.
Paperback: Nov 2011,
368 pages.
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 weeklytrips 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.
The Tiger's Wife is, on the surface, a tale of one woman's search for the truth behind her beloved grandfather's death, but the implications of this search are fundamental to the way we make sense of life and death. Obreht's delicate unfolding of Natalia's grandfather's past presents a multi-dimensional view of a man Natalia believed she knew. From the reader's view, these different perspectives are suspended but never resolved, so that we are left with the final, breathless conclusion that they could all be true. The tantalizing notion that the fantastic and unbelievable can co-exist with the mundane has long fueled religion, fiction, and folklore. Obreht teases out the human impulse to create stories, to contrive wonder in the face of temporality, and the result is extraordinary. (Reviewed by Sarah Sacha Dollacker).
Entertainment Weekly
[A] spectacular debut novel…[Téa] Obreht spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerizing reader wants her never to stop…Obreht will make headlines as one of the most exciting new writers of her generations, a young artist with the maturity and grace that comes of knowing where one is from, and of honoring those who came before. Grade: A
San Francisco Chronicle - Yael Goldstein Love
Perhaps it is this gift - the ability to show and obscure in the same instant - that accounts for the strange power of Obreht's storytelling.
Kirkus Reviews
While at times a bit too dense and confusing, Obreht's remarkable story showcases a young talent with a bright future. A compassionate, mystical take on the real price of war.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Demanding one’s full attention, this complex, humbling, and beautifully crafted debut from one of The New Yorker’s "20 Under 40" is highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in contemporary fiction.
Booklist
Starred Review. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.
Colum McCann
Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years.
T. C. Boyle
A novel of surpassing beauty, exquisitely wrought and magical. Téa Obreht is a towering new talent.
Ann Patchett
A marvel of beauty and imagination. Téa Obreht is a tremendously talented writer.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Clara Not worth the cost. As someone who is retired and on limited income I have to chose my reads wisely. I really tried to read this book and kept hoping it would grab my interest. Half way through I had to give it up. Too many tales intertwined and uninteresting. I would... Read More
Rated of 5
by campy too confusing A hard book to read-- I have read hundreds in my lifetime and this one was a complete waste of time--
Rated of 5
by Virginia a confusing maelstrom of events and characters What was this book trying to say, except string together an unlikely mixture of apparent fact, fable and myth into incredibly long sentences which meander and jump from one thing to another. Do yourself a favour -read something else! The book club... Read More
Rated of 5
by avward Indigestion Although a good first novel, I do feel it wasn't necessary to have that many myths/legends or folklore stories to get her point across. I feel with all that that was going on, I got a bit lost and found the history of characters like the... Read More
Rated of 5
by Judy R. Extraordinary. I read this book twice in immediate succession. Not because it was obscure, but because it was multidimensional and I wanted to savor all facets. The story-line alone was compelling and life-like in its detail. And profoundly personal in its... Read More
Rated of 5
by Dorothy T. Original fiction This novel is a mixture of reality and fantasy, but it's choppy construction and large group of characters make it hard to follow and the ending unclear. The author may be on to something original; it may be interesting to see what she does next.
The Tiger's Wife comes out of the magical realism tradition. Like the technique itself, the definition of magical realism is difficult to pin down, but most critics agree that it is a literary mode that "seizes the paradox of the union of opposites." In this way, writers are able to hold, as Obreht does, the real and the fantastic together so that both paradoxical elements are accepted in the same thought.
Though the idea of magical realism was originated in 1920s Germany by Franz Roh to describe post-expressionist art, the term lo real maravillso (magical realism), as applied to literature came out of Latin America in the late 1940s. The first writers to find literary success with this mode were Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges and Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who used the technique to meld European rationality with the Native American "magical" mentality. With this technique, they attempted to develop the pure Latin American novel.
Though some critics argue that Latin American authors developed magical realism in...
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(967 words).
Kirkus Reviews
Colum McCann
of 5
by Clara
of 5
by avward
of 5
by Judy R.
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