"The Tiger's Wife"

I came here to tell you how much I absolutely loved "The Tiger's Wife," and I wanted to also link to Tea Obreht's essay in Harper's a few years ago about vampire hunting in Romania. I can't find it, but I came across someone who hated the novel, who found it "insufferably dull" and overwritten. Before I get how much, and why, I loved it, I have to address Ruth Fowler's critiques (though on a very superficial): one reader's overwritten is another's just-right, and I, myself, am pretty sensitive to overwritten. I can't entirely disagree with Fowler; the book could have stood a little bit of editing. But not a lot. And I'll admit that it took me a while to get into because of the tone and style: it wasn't lyrical. In a way, it was the opposite experience of reading "The Free World," which wowed me on the first page but got tangled in its own unruly thread as the overly detailed stories progressed. "The Tiger's Wife" did not wow me at first, but it won me over as I got into it.

And indeed, Fowler didn't bother to read the whole book. She missed out; I'm not sure how anyone could find it dull. [I see that Fowler also has little time for Zadie Smith; I quite liked "White Teeth."] But to each her own. And the characters were anything but two-dimensional; in fact, to the extent that there were villains or antagonists, they were very balanced and human. But let us leave behind the nasty, ad hominem ("plump, blonde, smiling") attack--what else can you get from someone who didn't get past the first fifty pages--and talk about how amazing this book is.

"The Tiger's Wife" masterfully frames the most recent Balkan conflict in the greater historical context of the region without making it sound like a history lecture. Obreht makes the history real through stories. You get a sense of the villages; the characters' lives and environments jump out at you. You understand that this last conflagration is an almost inevitable extension of the region's past. An excerpt:

When your fight has purpose--to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent--it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling--when it is abotu your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event--there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who home against it.

Like so many other stories set in or in another way rooted in the Balkans ("No Man's Land," "The Secret Life of Words"), the story-tellers deemphasize, if not deliberately confuse you, about the ethnicities of the characters, as if to emphasize the pointlessness of the ethnic dimension of the conflict. To the same end, they point out the intra-ethnic dimension of some of the atrocities and the inter-ethnic dimensions of the preference for peace. Another excerpt:

At this moment, the old waiter comes back, bringing with him my bottle. I can remember it now. It's an '88 Salimac, from a famous vineyard that will soon be on our side of the border. He serves it to me like it means nothing to him--and I get the sense that he is being on showing the great strength of character it takes for him to serve me this wine like it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference to him whether or not the owner of the vineyard is bayoneting his son in the airplane factory right now.

But don't think that all or even most of the book is about the conflict. It's really just a really well-written, compelling story, with artful historical framing. There's a lot going on, across the decades and the places, but Obreht brings it home.