Spurred by her recent appearance in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 anthology, and a general buzz among my co-workers, I picked up an advanced copy of Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. I finally finished it late last night, purposefully reading slower as the last pages approached and the back half of the book grew thinner and thinner. I turned off the lamp and just sat in the dark, thinking about it, re-working each plot point and trying to remember the last time a book really got at me so intensely.
The Tiger’s Wife is the finest work of magical realism I have read since I greedily poured over Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school. Like Marquez, Obreht packs an embarrassment of riches into her work. Each chapter of the book is like a Russian nesting doll, revealing smaller and more wondrous stories, each character contains multitudes. Esoterica abounds, and every flashback is full of old-world mysticism and ancient rites largely forgotten in our modern times.
Beginning in the current-day Balkans, The Tiger’s Wife reviews more than 70 years of the region’s history, much of it under an inescapable specter of war. Death and destruction are lurking on almost every page, but Obreht’s message is still hopeful. Both the main protagonist, Natalia, and her grandfather are doctors…good, thoughtful ones at that…valiantly attempting to save people and animals without surrendering to fear. They realize that our war against death is ultimately unwinnable, but that doesn’t mean you should stop fighting.
There’s been a lot of discussion about Obreht’s young age, but I don’t really want to engage in it. If you spend too much time asking the why and how, delving into superficial divisions like age and gender, then you’ll miss the point. This is a supreme work, and ultimately I don’t care if Obreht is 20 or 100. I’m just glad we have it now.
The Tiger’s Wife is available for purchase on March 8th. Tea Obreht will be appearing at BookPeople on Tuesday, March 15th at 7PM.
BookPeople 