The Tiger's Wife
Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is a book you could spend years unpacking. There is a central plot, but the action of this book curls around that small plot so that what really grabs you is all that back story rather than what’s happening in the novel’s “now.”
The plot that frames the novel is simple enough to explain. A young doctor, Natalia, is on her way to an orphanage after her country split itself apart in a war when she learns that her grandfather has died in a small town. Her grandmother is adamant that Natalia retrieve his belongings, which she does after tangling with some local gypsies who are in the process of locating and reburying a long dead cousin. While all this is going on, Natalia tells her grandfather’s story, of his meetings with the deathless man, and his relationship with the tiger’s wife of the title. Through telling his story, Natalia tells the story of her country during the twentieth century, a story that reflect the history of any number of southern Eastern Europe.
Two things really struck me about this book, and they both have to do with the role of specific kinds of stories. First, there is the recurring theme of superstition. Superstition is everywhere in this book. Aside from the fact that this book is very definitely set in the twentieth and possibly early twenty-first century, there are scenes with villagers that sound like they could have happened any time in the last thousand years the way they go on about devils and rituals.
Superstition provides an explanation for crop failures and too long winters. The tiger that roams the ridges and kills livestock is a devil, and the deaf-mute girl they call the tiger’s wife is his accomplice. The tiger and his wife give the villagers a tangible target for their worry and their hate, rather than the actual, complex causes. Even in Natalia’s present, superstition is still there. The gypsies she tangles with are reburying their cousin because they believe that cousin is haunting them and causing their children to get sick. When she tries to reason with them, she hits a brick wall time and again until she gives in and helps them (though she does it on the condition that they bring their kids into the local clinic for treatment).
Obreht shows the reader repeatedly how stubborn people are about their traditions and beliefs. The only way that anyone can achieve a real solution is to manipulate those superstitions. Said another way, you just have to go with it to get anywhere.
Second, there is the inescapable grasp of history. This country is steeped in it’s own history in a way that I don’t think a lot of Americans have felt. I certainly haven’t. The stories and adventures and tragedies of the pass stick around in this country. Several characters remark on the fact that they have always either been at war or are recovering from one and waiting for the next one to begin. As Natalia tells her grandfather’s history, there are connections and hints of connections. Everything is tied together: her grandfather, the butcher who brought the tiger’s wife to the village, the apothecary, and the tiger itself. Though told separately, they’re really the same story–just told from different perspectives and at different points.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve moved around a lot, or I’ve lives in biggish towns and cities all my life, I’ve never felt the connection to a place the way that the characters in this book do. This novel shows how the current generation has roots that stretch back over the decades and centuries. Though Obreht never names the country where this novel is set, it feels very real, like this country could really exist. After reading this book, I wonder what it would be like to have roots like that, to live somewhere where my family has lived since anyone can remember. On the one hand, I think it could feel very smothering, as though you have to shoulder the mistakes of your ancestors because everyone can remember them. On the other, I can see how one could feel a strong sense of belonging, to be a part of a rich history and tradition. In this book, I think the role of history is that it provides a slightly more rational way of explaining how we all got where we are.
My reading of all this is that The Tiger’s Wife is about the conflict between superstition and reason, and about its symbiosis. It’s a very complex tale, and I think it would take a couple more readings to parse it all out.
I want to end this review with a very arresting passage from the end of the book, because I can’t express what Obreht has done in this book nearly so well as Obreht did originally. But I think this passage reflects that symbiosis between rational, objective history and irrational, subjective superstition:
There is, however, and always has bee, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here, a large flat slab of stone where the sun is always cast. My grandfather’s tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger’s wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore. (337*)
* From the 2011 Random House hardback edition.
