If you are going to find The Tiger’s Wife believable, in the current, fiction issue of The New Yorker, then you first have to believe in the tiger. Tea Obreht has to win the reader’s confidence immediately or the game is up. I wish I could understand how writers do this.
Have you ever been absorbed in a story and then doubled-back…marvelling at how you got sucked in?
April, 1941, Eastern Europe: Germans power-bomb a city and the animals in the citadel, the local zoo, are left to starve. The tiger lies impotent in its own waste, dying of thirst.
When a wall is breached, the beast crawls away. Now imagine the decimated city…from an animal’s point of view…how a rotting city smells…and tastes…fresh corpses fall from the trees like fruit…or like snacks from a Pez dispenser. The unacceptable and abnormal, like the sight of a tiger walking down your street, becomes believable.
November, 1941: a mountain village is snowed in and safe from the Nazis until the spring thaw. But it’s not safe from the devil. Vladisa, the herdsman, has seen him up on the ridge above the village, gnawing on a lost calf.
TO’s story contains: a narrator of archival events so the POV is wide and deep, dialogue that doesn’t need attribution…no he said, she said…because it’s just village talk…a central character who’s a deaf mute…so no dialogue at all…but that doesn’t stop her from being the foil on which the story turns, a book within the narrative…in this case it’s Kipling’s Jungle Book, some wonderful folklore, like a witch’s hut that perches on one giant chicken’s leg, the devil (perhaps), one tiger.
It’s terribly promising to read a short story, by a kid who was born in 1985, that contains so many ingenious devices. I especially loved TO’s way with voice. Her narrrator tells the story of their grandfather, who appears as a boy, raised in a remote mountain village by his grandmother. The talk of the village folk functions like some crazy mix of a greek chorus and the National Inquirer.
The deaf mute is a Muslim woman, an outlier in a village of Christians. She’s the wife of the butcher, Luka. The National Inquirer would be thrown into overdrive by the rumors about these two. Why has he married her? So he’d have someone at home who could keep her mouth shut? It looks like he beats her…and there’s the rumor that he’s married her as a cover so he could play around with guys.
I want to confess that I’m in my element in a story like this. My father was a boy in a Greek village much like this one; and he grew up as a teenager in Turkey and Egypt. He would tell me the village stories…although never one about a tiger.
Mahfouz, Pamuk and Kazantzakis: If you tap on their names, you’ll see that I’ve recommended a book by each that’s offers you the tales, the beauty and the particular wisdom of the part of the world that my father knew so well and that comes off as such an entertaining read in The Tiger’s Wife by the gifted Tea Obreht. In The New Yorker, this week.
-DH
What's the story with the photo? (Feel free to make one up)
Tiger's Wife was indeed very impressive an absorbing.
The photo: I stumbled onto this street fair. I took only one shot of this. I was afraid that they would notice I was there. They didn't. In some places, like street fairs, no one notices who is around them.
"Tiger's Wife" is great. I am looking forward to more from this writer.