Author: Téa Obreht
Published: 2011
Genre: Fiction
In the Tiger's Wife, Téa Obreht retells the story of a tiger that escapes from a zoo during the Balkans war. Told through the protagonist, Natalia the story is both allegorical and entertaining enough. The sudden and strange circumstances surrounding the news of her grandfather's death, a medical doctor like herself, leave Natalia following the path her grandfather may have taken in the latter days of his life as a way to try and uncover answers to the mystery around his death.
Téa Obrecht weaves a tale that takes the reader from current day to the war in the Balkans, yet it does not overwhelm as the history is melded well with the plot. With the use of narration that is from her grandfather's perspective, combining both present day and past the book recounts the story of a tiger in a small village, Galina , the village in which her grandfather grew up, and that became central to the lives of the people in the small village. Belief in both superstition and the inexplicable presence of the tiger in their lives leaves a town united in their fear of the inexplicable as they try to find meaning in the looming presence of the animal. The Tiger's wife is a young, recently widowed deaf-mute child-bride, who becomes the target of the town's curiosity, suspicion and gossip due to her attachment to the tiger, which ventures frequently in to the village- feared by the entire village yet obviously attached to the young girl.
Central to the plot is the deathless man, which to Natalia had been a myth until her realisation that her grandfather, had not only been seeking this deathless man, with whom he had had numerous encounters, but may well have been in his presence in his last days. Superstition and ritual are ever-present in the book, a uniting theme for the people of the village. It is a theme that the educated, medical doctor Natalia- very much like her grandfather, the man of science, finds herself turning to, in the quest for answers and is unwittingly a part of, in her visits to the zoo with her grandfather as a young girl; when she makes the journey to the place of her grandfather's death as an adult, to find answers as well as return the items of the loved one as part of the forty days mourning period.
I would normally not have picked this book up, not being such a huge fan of fantastical/magic realism in fiction, but I read an interview with the author and my interest was piqued, and the award-winning tag got me. It was the 2011 Orange Prize Winner for Fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment