Booktalk

I have just finished Tea Obreht’s book, The Tiger’s Wife. Like other significant books in my life, I am having a hard time leaving it. I still bring it home every night, still set it on the end-table next to my coffee cup and and newspaper, and still open it to reread a paragraph that I have noted on the bookmark still pointing from the pages.

It is hard to leave the layers of the story, the simplicity of the truths, and the urgency of the telling. So many of the experiences and perspectives ring true although the back- drop of tale is so foreign to my stable world. How can that be?

The story takes place across generations within the broken Balkans - broken now, broken in the Bosnian War, World War II, and explosive as its fractured self at World War I. That minefield of religions, languages, terrain, and exploitation provides a setting of constant instability and triage. And yet individuals within that dissolution must endure that reality or one of their making.

The wrecked world these characters inhabit is so unreal to us that the spirits, superstitions, and beliefs we encounter through them are wonderfully believable, even as they walk as allegory and myth through the pages.  Like the characters, we need them, as we do our own, to tell and understand the journey.

I offer the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 (in the spirit and letter of fair-use) to illustrate the author's command of her realities:



The Tiger’s Wife is a compelling piece of storytelling. It is poignant without being sentimental, wise without being preachy, and endlessly, fearlessly inventive without being fantastical. How can this be?

That is easily understood when reality is conjured with masterful words.