The Tiger's Wife

by Tea Obreht

This novel, published in 2011, has won several awards, including the Orange Prize. Tea Obreht was the youngest author to have ever received this distinction. The novel takes place in an unidentified Balkan country, and moves back and forth between the period after the Balkan wars and what was then Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The narrator is a young doctor who comes to an orphanage to inoculate children there. The orphanage is located near a small village where her beloved grandfather , also a doctor, recently died, and she goes to the village to collect his possessions. Neither the orphanage nor the village are identified geographically. As Natalia, the narrator, embarks on the search for her grandfather’s belongings, various stories told to her by her grandfather when she was a child are woven into the narrative, in particular the story of the “the deathless man” and the the story of the tiger’s wife, a deaf-mute girl whom Natalia’s grandfather knew when he was a child living in a tiny, snowbound village during the Second World War, and who befriended a tiger who had escaped from the zoo during a bombing raid. 

There is actually very little plot in this novel, as it weaves a series of quite surreal myths or stories into the brief period that covers Natalia’s trip to the orphanage and her excursion to the village where her grandfather died. In reading some commentary about “The Tiger’s Wife”, it seems that the author’s gifts of storytelling were highly praised by the critics, especially in one so young. However, the consensus in our group was that the stories of the deathless man, the tiger’s wife, and other myths such as the man who turns into a bear, did not really touch a chord with us. Most of us agreed that the book was very well-written, but left us a little perplexed as to what the author wanted to express. There was also a sense of frustration (at least on my part) regarding the character of Natalia, about whom one would have liked to know more, but perhaps she was just meant to relay the myths and stories that were so much a part of her grandfather’s life, this magical element in the life of a man of science.

By Christine