With fables and allegories, as well as events borrowed from the headlines, [Obreht] illustrates the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence that pervade the region even in times of peace. Reaching back to World War II, and then to wars that came before, she reveals the continuity beneath the clangor … Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes Natalia’s matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen … Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.
Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war … It’s not so much magical realism in the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez or Günter Grass as it is an extraordinarily limber exploration of allegory and myth making and the ways in which narratives reveal — and reflect back — the identities of individuals and communities: their dreams, fears, sympathies and hatreds … As Ms. Obreht parcels out chapters of these two fables, she gives us vivid portraits of Gavo, the tiger’s wife and other fairy-tale-like characters. By peopling The Tiger’s Wife with such folkloric characters, alongside more familiar contemporary types, Ms. Obreht creates an indelible sense of place.
Obreht's swirling first novel, The Tiger's Wife, draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch … Her thoughtful narrator must navigate the land mines – literal and political – that still blot the countryside. Natalia's world is a steampunk mingling of modern technology and traditional tools – cellphones and antibiotics alongside picks and poultices … Its sentiments are refreshingly un-American. Anxiously youth-obsessed, we've always been awkward and weird about death; our rituals for grieving and commemorating are still chaotic and ad hoc. But The Tiger's Wife never strays far from the desire of desperate people to do right by the dead, no matter how much time has passed.
By obscuring the geography of the region and alluding to historical events only obliquely, The Tiger’s Wife intentionally blurs the demarcation between the real and the imaginary. Poised between reality and myth, it uses two separate narrative techniques, that of the novel and that of the folktale, one immersed in historical time, the other sealed off from any particular time … The Tiger’s Wife, with its many different stories, is a novel of immense complexity. First, it is an extended elegy for the narrator’s beloved grandfather, a man with a life story entangled in the fate of the country once known as Yugoslavia, who was able to maintain his compassion and decency in time of ethnic hatred and violence; it is also a lament for all those anonymous men, women, and children made homeless in these cruel and senseless wars.
The Tiger's Wife, in its solemn beauty and unerring execution, fully justifies the accolades that Ms. Obreht's short fiction inspired. She has a talent for subtle plotting that eludes most writers twice her age, and her descriptive powers suggest a kind of channeled genius. No novel this year has seemed more likely to disappoint; no novel has been more satisfying ... With her blending of folklore and naturalism, Ms. Obreht calls to mind Gabriel García Márquez ... Care has been taken with each line of this book, not least in the description of the tiger itself, 'bright and real, carved from sunlight.' The author imposes a stillness on the reader as the novel's imagery and cadence seem to call to the mysteries of life and death.
Tea Obreht shows how shared mythology (where history meets speculation) is essential, particularly in times of war and loss … Man or myth, all of the characters in The Tiger's Wife are lovingly rendered. They could be the subject of their own novels — from the Deathless Man to the apothecary down the street … Natalia's conclusion at the end of the novel explains that the truth of these stories is less important than the symbolism they provide.
Obreht can write. She can put a sentence together, inhabit characters with lives far different than hers; she can trace the horrors of a war she's never seen … And yet as The Tiger's Wife progresses, its sense of balance begins to be a problem, pushing us out of the narrative, or narratives, at the very point we want to be drawn in. Partly, this has to do with momentum, which is difficult to sustain in a novel with three main threads that overlap at regular intervals … This is the conundrum of the novel, any novel: between telling and withholding, between sharing and keeping back. Fiction is as much an art of omission as it is one of commission, and in The Tiger's Wife, Obreht commits too much ... Writing, again, beautiful writing, but in the end, The Tiger's Wife might have benefited from a little less art and a little more life.
Not even Obreht’s place on the New Yorker’s current '20 under 40' list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land ... Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance.
[Obreht] spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerized reader wants her never to stop … As Natalia unravels the mysteries surrounding his death, remembered stories either by or about her grandfather and other family members spill out, anchoring her in tradition and lore even as she tries to live in her fractured modern land … Obreht is joltingly young to have found such a clear, wise voice, moored by the faintly droll storytelling style of her heritage and set free by her own tremendous talent.
The brilliant black comedy and matryoshka-style narrative are among the novel's great joys. But they are also one of the problems: after meeting innumerable exotic characters, it dawned on me that the back-stories stand in for a story, and style stands in for emotion ... But there is a sorrow that sometimes undercuts the flights of fancy, and this saves The Tiger's Wife from being a freak show. Obreht's – and Natalia's – real journey is back in time, and the real investigation here is of the difficult times, violent death and crippled afterlife of that mythical place once called Yugoslavia ... The Tiger's Wife is a frisky tiger cub chasing its tail – it covers a lot of ground, growls a lot, and never quite gets there, but we have fun along the way. What the novel lacks in emotional depth, it makes up for in personality and sheer wackiness.
The Tiger’s Wife is an elaborate, haunting work that deserves to be ranked at least alongside other great debuts like Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. It might even prove to be better than that ... Obreht’s ability to tell a story is intoxicating, and with each tale we’re drawn deeper and deeper into the heart of the world she has created ... In the end, Obreht doesn’t tie up all of these threads, or the novel, in a definitive way. We’re never quite sure what happens to the tiger, or to Luka, or Gavran Gailé. But ambiguity is part of her intention in all this. After all, it’s the low rumble of unanswered and unanswerable questions that keeps us up at night and with which the The Tiger’s Wife vibrates.
This novel illuminates a young narrator coming to terms with the deaths of beloved relatives, of strangers, of old ways. But it is also about discovering what is immortal: not just the vampires of local legend, but also love and cultural memory … Obreht seems to suggest that even those we love remain inscrutable, a composite of experiences we can never wholly share … The Tiger’s Wife is full of vivid, dreamlike scenes that conjure a place wracked with conflict … Obreht’s mesmerizing writing is key to this novel, which succeeds through a kind of harmonic resonance more than a driving plot. For all its historical and mythological specificity, The Tiger’s Wife is content to let ambiguities remain; Obreht is one fabulist who doesn’t need a moral at the end of her tales
Natalia's story seems to function as little more than a thin tissue connecting the real organs of the book, the story of the deathless man and the story of the tiger's wife...These stories - pulsing with dark life - are clearly the book's reason for being, and better reasons would be hard to come by … These two stories twist around each other in complicated knots, trading characters and settings, gliding in and out of Natalia's narrative as smooth and vibrant as Turkish silks. Together they function to raise fascinating questions about the meaning of adulthood given that, really, we are all helpless as children, at the mercy of governments, of our neighbors, of chance, given how quickly, even eagerly, confusion and fear become hatred, become evil doings.
Obreht aspires to erase our compulsion to commemorate war through old gestures of gritty realism or melodrama. Here metaphor will carry the day, as colorful and sturdy as the copy of The Jungle Book
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Obreht was the youngest person on The New Yorker’s list of the 20 best fiction writers under 40, and The Tiger’s Wife lives up to its hype. The book provides an intimate view of life in a place where war is always close to the horizon. She obligingly mentions commonly known hazards like teens being blown up by landmines years after the weapons serve any military relevance. The Tiger’s Wife also provides a deeper look at the less obvious effects of war.
We haven’t seen one of these events in quite a while, a serious literary debut of a gifted writer in her mid-20s who with a first book seems poised to have a long and brilliant literary career ... Obreht writes with an angel’s pen, creating a skein of descriptive passages, plush with apt details and ringing with lyrical diction — of city life, of country life, of private dreams and public difficulties — and about the way the past and present come together into a complex and seething whole ... I found one word in the entire book that rang false for me — and about a hundred thousand that rang entirely true.
Obreht is a natural literary descendant of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gabriel García Márquez. She has assimilated and alchemized the techniques of folkloric storytelling and magical realism with a fresh contemporary sensibility, along with her own ethnic identity and life experiences. After a few pages, I forgot her age entirely except to marvel at the precocity of her work's vast intelligence, at the beauty of her descriptive prose, at her authoritative voice, and at her controlled mastery of a complex narrative.
To be truly spellbound by a good story is a rare treat. Téa Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, delivers in manifold ways, weaving several tales from different eras in an unnamed stand-in for her homeland, the former Yugoslavia ... Obreht, born in Belgrade in 1985, is an elegant writer with an eye for rich details, from a loved one's daily habits, to how the foods of a long-ago occupier evolve into national staples, to descriptions of places and people.
One secret to this particular woman's success might be her biography. While it does not explain her skills, the varied geography of her upbringing clearly served as inspiration ... highly original, funny and frightening, and a welcome addition to writing on the region ... These mythical features reveal Ms Obreht's greatest strengths. Her writing is remarkable, but she doesn't show off, nor does she ask too much of our imaginations. Like the characters in the story, we are easily drawn to the unbelievable elements of this tale because they sweep us away from the real world.
The tales themselves prove individually luscious, though not without an unpleasant cumulative effect. It may strike some as a cavil, but the plain truth is that The Tiger's Wife, while certainly entertaining and of considerable literary merit, is too rich for its own good: Obreht would have been well-advised to parcel out its constituent elements as stand-alone stories ... Obreht's storytelling impulse is so powerful that she cannot help devising extensive background histories for a host of secondary characters. These tangents distract attention from the main narrative, but often prove intriguing and contain some of the book's most enduring images ... if Obreht narrows her focus and curtails her embellishments, her undeniable flair for storytelling could produce a magnificent novel. Until then, The Tiger's Wife will seduce and confound, fascinate and exasperate.
Obreht layers story upon story, creating something almost as dense as a baklava. In the middle of one, she’ll pause to reveal the complete history of the village’s lone gun, which is soon to be put to use hunting tigers. Readers with no taste for tangents will want to seek elsewhere. The Tiger’s Wife can be gorgeous, but the plot doesn’t so much run in a line as glory in atmospheric tangles. Ladies and tigers have been united memorably several times before in literature, from limericks to short stories. Obreht’s evocative novel should rank among the most indelible pairings of all.
Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure.
Obreht threads together echoes of community gossip and folklore, vividly evoking the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small village, and the feelings of fear and hope that become heightened at times of war. This is a tale of many layers: interspersed between the episodic story of the tiger, and Natalia's own quest to find her grandfather's 'deathless man,' are Natalia's memories of teenage life during the heavy, pregnant pause before the war of the 1990s hit her city, and life after the bombs started falling. It is a poignant, seductive novel.
Haunted as it is by the specter of civil war, this confident debut steers clear of specific blame for any particular group, concentrating instead on the stories people tell themselves to explain the unthinkable. 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.
