The Tiger’s Wife

By Tea Obreht
Weidenfeld & Nicolson $36.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

This debut novel is getting a lot of attention partly because the author is young – only 26 – and to have written a work of such scope and complexity so early in her career is an achievement.  Obreht will be in Auckland this week to talk about her book – which has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize -  at the Writers & Readers Festival. But is it really all that good? The answer is only in parts. The Tiger’s Wife is a book of brilliant moments.

The beginning is promising. In a Balkan country scarred by war a young doctor called Natalia is setting out to cross the border to deliver vaccines to an orphanage. On the way she discovers her beloved grandfather has died in a clinic in an obscure town no one knew he was visiting. She begins to revisit her memories of him and the legends he has told her about his own life. “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man” she explains and then proceeds to relate both those tales.

Obreht was born in the former Yugoslavia but raised mostly in the US. Perhaps this novel is her attempt to come to terms with her country’s chaotic and troubled history. It’s an ambitious and imaginative piece of fiction: she folds in folklore, superstition and legend; there is metaphor after metaphor, stories within stories.

There are poignant moments too and episodes that stay with you – the grandfather’s final meal in the town that’s about to be bombed to pieces, the elephant he and Natalia see walking through the boulevards of their city in the middle of the night, the story of the hungry but noble tiger’s escape from the bombed zoo.

Obreht knows how to make a sentence sing but while her writing is beautiful and very clever The Tiger’s Wife reads too much like a short story that has been worked up into a longer fiction. Obreht has told interviewers she didn’t write in any sort of a linear way, instead working on the chapters and passages that interested her most and then putting them all together. The trouble is you can see the joins - the main threads never weaving themselves properly into the fabric of the story. And however brilliant the parts that make up the whole might be, however compelling and striking the writing, I found it difficult to get past this flaw.

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Life was published in April, 2010, while her latest The Villa Girls, was published three weeks ago and is riding high on the NZ bestseller list.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 1 May, 2011 as was the Booklover column below.

Booklover

Tanya Moir is a Southland writer who recently published her debut novel La Rochelle’s Road (Random House, $39.99)

The book I love most is...........Illywhacker, by Peter Carey. It’s one of his earlier works, but still my favourite – a real tour-de-force, full of fire and magic. Carey’s a writer who can make you laugh and break your heart in the same sentence, and this is a fearless, angry, glorious novel – one that grabs a nation’s idea of itself by the throat and gives it a good shake. For anyone who has ever wondered what the point of historical fiction is – read this.

The book I'm reading right now is.........Charlotte Randall’s new novel Hokitika Town, and I’m finding it really difficult to put it down. I love her work – she’s a razor-sharp observer who isn’t afraid to push boundaries, and, like Carey, she manages to be devastatingly funny and moving all at the same time. This one’s got a cracking setting in the 1865 Gold Rush, and the child narrator, Halfie, is an absolute joy.

 The book I'd like to read next is........John le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor. Well, you have to, don’t you?

The book that changed me is........Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was the book that first made me begin to think I might want to try to write fiction, so I guess you could say it changed me.

It was my first encounter with magical realism – such an explosion of colour and form, like a Gaudi building made out of words. It took my breath away. I thought, so that’s what can be done with language. Cool.

The book I wish I'd never read is...........I can’t actually remember the title, but a horror novel I read as a teenager – my first and last foray into that genre. It involved a particularly nasty vision of what happens to you after you die… I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say there was a lot of decomposition and zombies, and not in a funny Shaun of the Dead kind of way. Once those sort of images are in your head, it’s hard to get them out again. Death is hard enough to handle. Why make it scary in that way as well?