BOOK REVIEW
Téa Obreht, The
Tiger’s Wife (NY: Random House, 2011), 338 pp.
Like many who have read this
first novel, written by a young woman still in her twenties, I marvel at the
very existence of the book. How could someone this young have written a
narrative this complicated, this full of insights into human nature, this teeming
with art—this good? I have read
several reviews of the book online and I marvel once again at the caviling, the
failure to appreciate the book on the part of some reviewers. Have American
readers become so inured to the genre of “domestic literary realism,” this
dull, insipid stuff that dominates the publishing world these days—stories of
ordinary Americans doing ordinary things, told, for the most part, in flat
ordinary language—that they fail to appreciate something with genuine verve and
brilliance?
Let us take, e.g., separate
sentences, so many of which shine with panache: “Luka was the sixth son of a
seventh son, born just shy of being blessed, and this almost-luck sat at his
shoulders all his life” (191). Or separate paragraphs, consisting of lavish
detail, as in this description of “the Winter Palace of Emin Pasha. . . a relic
of the City’s Ottoman history”:
“The upper floor of the palace
was a cigar club for gentlemen, with a card room and bar and library, and an
equestrian museum with mounted horses from the pasha’s cavalry, chargers with
gilded bridles and the jangling processional saddles of the empire, creaking
carriages with polished wheels, rows and rows of pennants bearing the empire’s
crescent and star. Downstairs, there was a courtyard garden with arbors of
jasmine and palm, a cushioned arcade for outdoor reading, and a pond where a
rare white frog was said to live in a skull that had been wedged under the lily
pads by some assassin seeking to conceal the identity of his now headless victim.
There were portraiture halls with ornate hangings and brass lamps, court
tapestries depicting feasts and battles, a small library annex where the young
ladies could read, and a tearoom where the pasha’s china and cookbooks and
coffee cups were on display” (244-45).
The rare white frog, sticking up
his head in the midst of the description, is typical; as is that skull, which
inserts its eyeless self into the long narrative for just that one brief moment.
A page later, in the description of the trophy room, we come upon “the mounted
body of a hermaphroditic goat” (246). Not for nothing does the author, in
interviews, acknowledge her debt to Márquez and Bulgakov. Throughout The Tiger’s Wife the reader is swimming
in the lavish world of magical realism. I suppose that the waves are too high
for some readers, who can’t make it through the ornateness and the exotic
splendor—who bog down in the profusion of stories within stories. Me, I love
the swim.
Here is a writer who appears
already a master at pulling significant detail out of her writerly insides: “he
grew accustomed to the way bears died, and the way their skin came away from
the body if you cut it right, heavy, blood-filled, but as accommodating as a
dress pattern” (253). You read this and you think, Yes, Téa Obreht has had
experience skinning a bear—although she probably never has skinned a bear. She
never has practiced medicine or studied to be a doctor, so where does she get
all the convincing detail to describe the life of her main character, the doctor
Natalia, and the other central character, the doctor grandfather? She has lived
in Yugoslavia only for the early years of her life, so how can she be so
proficient at describing nature scenes in her native land?
“A greenish stone canal ran up
past the campground, and this was the route I took. Green shutters, flower
boxes in the windows, here and there a garage with a tarped car and maybe some
chickens huddled on the hood. There were wheelbarrows full of patching bricks
or cement or manure; one or two houses had gutting stations for fish set up,
and laundry lines hung from house to house, heavy with sheets and headless
shirts, pegged rows of socks. A soft-muzzled, black donkey was breathing
softly, tied to a tree in someone’s front yard” (85).
The setting appears to be
Yugoslavia in present time, dismembered by the collapse of Socialism and the
wars of the nineties. The complexities of a thousand years of bloody Balkan
history lurk in the background of the narrative, but the author chooses to
write not exactly about Yugoslavia. She writes, rather, about a fictional place
very similar to Yugoslavia. Some reviewers have faulted her for the way she
fictionalizes Serbia and Bosnia, the way she manipulates historical realities
to make them jibe with her narrative. But she has other fish to fry, and that’s
fine with me. Her story depends on the realities of a mythological land that
resembles what’s left of Yugoslavia; her story is anchored in folk superstition
and the gossipy tales peasants tell, which, when repeated over and over, take
on a reality of their own.
The NATO bombing of Belgrade
(Mar. 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999) is featured in a wonderful description of how
it feels to be bombed on the part of civilians, but Belgrade is not mentioned
(it is always referred to as “The City”). The doctor Natalia lives in Serbia,
but the word never appears in the book. The fictional town of Zdrevkov, where
her grandfather goes to die, is apparently on the Croatian coastline. Looking
at a map of Yugoslavia, you can trace the mercy mission of Natalia and her
fellow doctor and friend Zóra. They cross the border near Belgrade into Croatia
(which is always referred to as “the other side”) and drive to a fictional town
on the Adriatic Sea.
Why this hedging around with reality?
Well, for one thing, if you’re looking for a way to get your (already long)
novel totally bogged down, try describing the background facts of Balkan
history. Rebecca West had already done this in her monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and how many
pages did it take her? She, of course, wrote her book on the eve of WW II, so
she never got to the depressing rehash of the same old story—murder, rape,
genocide—in the nineties of the twentieth century. Or try explaining the complexities
of those recent Yugoslavian wars. Try ironing out the details of all sorts of
atrocities and Western interventions in those wars. Just treating the times
when NATO bombed various parts of the moribund Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia—why they bombed, who the bad guys were and who the good guys, who
the war criminals and who the victims—forget about it.
This is not to say that the war
is not involved in Natalia’s story. The war and its consequences are
everywhere. Here is the author on the breakup of Yugoslavia: “Once separate,
the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same
characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the
whole. . . The Nobel Prize winner was no longer ours, but theirs” (161). This
same sense of surrealism also prevailed in the minds of people right after the
collapse of the Soviet Union: “we’re not quite us anymore; we’re somebody else
now.” With Russians that sense of unreality was exacerbated by what might have
been notices posted all over what had only recently been an inveterate
atheistic country: “By the way, we were wrong. There is a God after all, and
you can have him back now. Enjoy.”
The grandfather’s take on Balkan
wars is instructive: “This war never ends. It was there when I was a child and
it will be here for my children’s children” (301). Téa Obreht accomplishes what
appears to be something like an acrobat’s trick. She puts aside one thousand
years of Balkan history and writes a book of magical realism, which book,
however, is still firmly based in Balkan folklore, and which book constantly
takes fleeting glances back at Balkan history.
The two main characters in The Tiger’s Wife are mythical rather
than realistic: the deathless man and the tiger’s wife. Both of them come, at
least obliquely, out of folklore. Natalia’s grandfather, one of the main
realistic characters—and a finely delineated, highly sympathetic man of
probity—is a medical doctor now, whose life is steeped in science and
rationality. But he has grown up in a small village where superstition counts
for everything. You have that mindset pounded into your head as a child, and
you have a cat in hell’s chance of ever ridding yourself of it.
The peasants believe firmly in
folkloric characters such as the witch Baba Roga, with “her skull-and-bones hut
on its one chicken leg” (106). How far back in Slavic folklore are to be found the
origins of this character? In Russian folklore she is Baba Yaga and her hut has
not lost one of its chicken legs. On the same page the wood demon (леший in
Russian) shows up. The villagers of Galina (the word is a woman’s name in
Russia) are storytellers, as is the author of this novel. Everyone is all eyes
in the village, watching incessantly from windows and doorways. And then all
tongues, blathering around, gossiping, making up stories. They gossip and their
gossip is transformed, folklore-style, into what for them is truth. They come
to believe in the fantasies of their own superstitious souls—they believe that
a woman could marry a tiger, that a man could be immortal.
Pagan superstition runs the
narrative in this book. “Like everyone in the village [Galina], he [the
blacksmith] had faith in the rituals of superstition. He gave money to beggars
before traveling, put pennies in the shrines of the Virgin at crossroads [see
below: syncretism], spat on his children when they were born. But, unlike his
fellow villagers, he was renowned for having a deficit. He had been born in a
lean year, without a ducat under his pillow. To make matters worse, an
estranged aunt had once allegedly lifted him from his crib and praised heaven
for what a beautiful baby, what a gorgeous, fat, blessed, rosy child he was—and
had sealed, forever, his destiny to be impoverished, crippled, struck down and
taken by the devil at some unexpected time, in some terrifying way” (120-21).
Note that word “allegedly.” Maybe the aunt is a fiction, maybe she never
committed this outrageous act of praise, but she is in the village said to have done it. Words have magical
force. Once the story is created, then repeated incessantly, the idea of the
“allegedly” is gone, and that is enough to seal the doom of the poor
blacksmith—who accidentally shoots himself in the head in the midst of the
tiger hunt.
Right smack in the middle of this
crazy pagan world is grandfather as a young boy in that village. Educated later
as a medical doctor, he steeps his life in scientific logic, but deep down in
his soul, one part of him still believes in the myth of the tiger’s wife, the
woman he befriended as a child. He fights valiantly against accepting the story
of the deathless man—whom he has personally encountered several times in his
life. But in the end, when he knows he is dying of cancer, he goes off in
search of that deathless man—who is also what they call a mora, a kind of psychopomp who cares for dead souls for forty days,
then guides them to the other world.
The best stories in the book
involve these two mythic characters, the tiger’s wife and the deathless man.
There is the wonderful description of grandfather’s first encounter with the latter.
This comes subsequent to an attempted murder. The deathless man is not only
immortal, but he also has the ability to see the deaths of others. Making the
mistake of telling a peasant in a village that he will soon die, the deathless
man is assaulted, drowned. Then, at his own funeral, he sits up in the coffin
and asks for water. Whereupon he is shot in the back of the head (58-62). When
grandfather comes upon him in the church, still in that coffin, the deathless
man, of course, having been drowned and shot, is still not dead.
Téa Obreht has a wonderful way of
weaving descriptions of such mythic proportions into the realistic narrative. At
one point the deathless man tells of how the wandering souls of the dead
sometimes get lost, cannot find their way home again, and “begin to fill up
with malice and fear,” which extends to their loved ones (186). Grandfather’s
wife believes thoroughly in such superstition, insisting that the family
observe the proper customs for assuring that (1) his soul does not take offense
and (2) properly finds its way to the next world. American readers may have
difficulty believing that even educated Serbians are so enveloped in
superstition, but anyone who has studied the Slavic world realizes that this is
the way things are. Of the many educated Russians I know, many with the
equivalent of the Ph.D., seldom do I find one who, e.g., does not believe in
the evil eye, or in omens.
We are two thousand years into
the era of Christianity, but pagan superstition is still paramount all over the
world. The Slavs, it sometimes appears, value pagan beliefs as much or more
than Christian beliefs, but the most common practice is to blend the two. In
the Balkans as well as in Russia syncretism (this dual belief) is rife. For
example, when Natalia arrives at the town on the Adriatic, she comes upon a
group of fellow Serbians who are digging in a vineyard. It turns out that they are
searching for the body of one of their countrymen, the cousin of one Duré.
During the recent wars Duré had to abandon his dead cousin, whom he buried in
this vineyard. Now some old conjure woman has informed him that the cousin’s
ghost is dissatisfied and vengeful; the spectre is spreading disease over the
whole family.
The only way to appease the ghost
of the cousin is to find the corpse, dig it up and give it a proper burial. Certain
pagan incantations (also provided by the conjure woman) must be read over the remains.
As the diggers clean the bones, they intone
these ancient chants. Meanwhile, the local Catholic priest tosses a censer
about, censing the pagan ritual with Christian incense (more syncretism). The
diggers also take care to break the thigh bones, thereby insuring that the
ghost can’t walk about and return to haunt them. Later the remains of the heart
(or what is a symbolic representation of the heart) have to be buried at a
crossroads, where the mora-psychopomp
can come to retrieve them, care for them for the requisite forty days, and then
transport them to the other world. Natalia the doctor keeps watch in the night
at the crossroads, and when a figure appears to dig up the jar with the “heart”
she too—despite her education in science—half believes that this is the
deathless man whom her grandfather has told her about.
“Even before he handed me the jar
I had admitted to myself that my desire to bury the heart on behalf of his
family had nothing to do with good faith, or good medicine, or any kind of
spiritual generosity. It had to do with the mora,
the man who came out of the darkness to dig up jars, and who was probably just
someone from the village playing a practical joke—but who was, nevertheless,
gathering souls at a crossroads sixty kilometers from where my grandfather had
died, a ferry ride from the island of the Virgin of the Waters. . . Or it would
be the deathless man, tall and wearing his coat, coming down through the fields
of long grass above the town—smiling, always smiling—and then I would sit,
without breathing, in some bush or under some tree while he dug up the jar,
probably whistling to himself, and when he had it in his hand, I would come out
and ask him about my grandfather” (266-67).
All of this narrative
line—concerning death and the deathless man and fear of the dead—has its
foundation in the ancient and atavistic fear of the dead worldwide, endemic in
human society from time out of mind—and by no means extirpated when the
Enlightenment came along.
As the author tells us, there are
two stories “that run like secret rivers” through grandfather’s life, and
through the whole book: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the
deathless man (32). The tiger’s wife shows up early on (p.4), when grandfather
tells little Natalia, “I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost
became one herself.” It’s as if the whole story is conjured up out of the
imagination of a four-year-old girl who goes with her grandfather to see the
tigers at the zoo. It is based on tales told her by her beloved grandfather,
and an event at the zoo sparks the tale: the day she and grandfather saw a
tiger maul the arm of a careless employee.
The main story line of the novel
is supplemented by tales of minor characters, as if the author just had so many
resplendent stories to tell that she could not resist getting them all into the
book. Some readers have complained of the superfluous accessories, but I love
reading all the different side narratives. About the butcher in the village, about the
apothecary who is a secret Muslim. About
Mića the Cleaver, he who distributes cadavers to the medical students (154-56).
Another tale, that of Dariša the Bear, begins with a story that is not true
(238), as do so many of the stories told throughout the book. Without the
untrue tales, the fantastications, the novel would be much shorter, and much
less intriguing. A subtheme of the novel
is storytelling, the power of words.
The tiger’s wife (while in love
with a tiger) is legally married to the butcher Luka, a kind of weird
intellectual in the midst of pagan superstition, who, despite his education,
takes up wife beating.
I find it interesting how we get
this description of violence wreaked upon a woman from the point of view of the
abuser. How many American woman writers could/would write it this way? Then
again, one of the book’s few weak points—and it is glaring—is the treatment of
the title character. We have a book called The
Tiger’s Wife, which suggests that she is the central character, but it
turns out that she is not. Not really. A big problem is that she is
consistently portrayed as a vague, unrounded figure. We see absolutely none of
the action from her point of view. We never even learn her real name. We have
no idea what she is all about, who she really is inside. In showing this
deaf-mute character to us the author as if makes us, the readers, deaf and mute
in our perception of her. She does not speak to us.
The other main mythic character,
the deathless man—in contrast to the tiger’s wife—is vibrantly alive and
accessible. The tiger’s wife exists only as a piece of village folklore. The
village gossip tells tales, invents her—she is a creature of mythmaking,
storytelling, not a real person. She is said to have been impregnated by the
tiger. As if aware that this narrative line would take the book too far off
into fantasy, the author does not follow it to its logical conclusion: the birth of a half human/ half tiger. The
fetus dies with the tiger’s wife when the apothecary poisons her. Given the
limitations of this vaguely delineated character, I think that the book could
have done with a different title.
To me the main character of the novel
is the grandfather. He is the only real person who has encountered both the
mythical deathless man and the mythical tiger’s wife. All of the narrative
proceeds with constant sideways and backwards glances at the grandfather, who—despite
his concourse with chimerical creatures—is thoroughly based in the reality of
everyday Balkan life. “All along my grandfather had hoped for a miracle but
expected disaster” (240). What better way to express the feelings of a denizen
of the Balkans?
The Tiger’s Wife has so many good sentences, good paragraphs, so
many good stories within stories about stories. What more could a lover of
literary art ask of a book?
