Sep 3

Sep 3 The Tiger's Wife

Author: Téa Obreht
Publisher: Random House
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Weaving a brilliant latticework of family legend, loss, and love, Téa Obreht, the youngest of The New Yorker's twenty best American fiction writers under forty, has spun a timeless novel that will establish her as one of the most vibrant, original authors of her generation.

In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather's recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her — the legend of the tiger's wife.

TL;DR Review

The Tiger’s Wife is so, so beautiful and compelling. This is storytelling at its best, and I’ll be recommending it for probably the rest of my life.

For you if: You like when books dip the smallest of toes into magical realism.

Full Review

“The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.”

I read The Tiger’s Wife *now* because I’m making my way through all the previous Women’s Prize winners for their #ReadingWomen challenge, and it won in 2011. But I have to believe that I would have eventually read this book anyway, because wow, did I love it.

This novel blends together three connected but distinct storylines. In the present day, our narrator Natalia’s gets a call that her grandfather just died. She’s across the border of their Balkan country to give vaccines to orphans. He died across the border as well, having told her grandmother that he was going to see Nadia. She travels to that tiny town to collect his belongings. She also spends chapters remembering back to her childhood and the war, and the three accounts her grandfather told her about meeting “the deathless man.” And finally, she tells us her grandfather’s childhood story featuring the tiger’s wife, which she sought out and learned after his death.

These three storylines weave together, in and out, to deepen the ideas of love and human nature and how the living confront death — our own, and that of others. I loved that each tale had a tiiiiiiny hint of almost-developed magical realism. I loved that each of the three had easter eggs for the others, but also stayed standing on their own. I loved how the stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife spun me up into a totally engrossed, totally emotional mental state.

This book is part novel, part village legend, part magic, and all gorgeous prose. It’s literary storytelling at its absolute finest. I am going to be recommending this book to people for probably the rest of my life.

As I said when I was only a third of the way into the book: I would read Téa Obreht’s grocery list.