Book review: 'The Tiger's Wife'

Book: The Tiger's Wife
Tea Obreht
Hachette
339 pages
Rs700

A bestiary in the Balkans! The very thought airlifts you out of the killing fields of the 1990s to a more fabulous plane where beasts may be quadrupeds, gentle creatures, properly tailed and fanged and clawed.

A child’s first defence against trauma is myth. It’s also Tea Obreht’s weapon in her pretty novel, The Tiger’s Wife, an imaginary portrait of home when it was still Yugoslavia.
With a little help from Rudyard Kipling, Obreht invents a fable from a very real happening, the Nazi bombing of a zoo in the 1940s.

This begins the story of the narrator’s grandfather, then a boy of nine. The narrator’s own experience, which spans the balkanised landscape of recent devastation, makes up the second layer of this novel. Permitting osmosis between the two, like a Harry Potter portkey, is Kipling’s Jungle Book.

Natalia, a pediatric surgeon, is travelling with her friend Zora to the town of Brejevina ‘across the border’, carrying medical supplies to an orphanage, when she hears news of her grandfather’s death. He was in Zdrevkov when he died — what was he doing there? And where was Zdrevkov? Grandfather’s body has been sent home, but his things, watch, glasses, wallet, the things that make up a man’s immediate possessions, these are missing. Raised in the belief that for forty days the soul  lingers about the furniture of its past life, Natalia feels compelled to retrieve her grandfather’s belongings, and bring them home.

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories; the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man…..One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he  told to me, is of  how he became a child again.” If only she had let the stories out, and left the inference to us.

The stories are both enchanting, and can be read either as straight narratives or as allegories. There’s a lost tiger, a brute husband, a princess under a spell, a misguided bear, and a larval prince in the first story. The second, more sophisticated, should have been more powerful. Natalia’s own narrative wobbles between these two stories in picture-perfect prose, but is dull in content. She’s too busy living out her grandfather’s life to take the present seriously. “First came the election, and then the riots, the assassination of a minister, the massacre at the delta, and then came Sarobor — and after Sarobor, it was like something loosening, a release.”  Sure, we recognise the milestones, but that’s a bit thin for Bosnia in the 1990s.

Obreht uses a mythical geography: Galina is an invented village, as, I think, is Zdrevkov. Sarobor is recognisable as Mostar because of the bombing of the 16th century Ottoman arched bridge Stari Mostar, across the river Neretva, on November 9, 1993.

The quest for the things that spell a man’s life and give it soul must be heroic, and progress towards revelation. Fables and allegories are powered by a certain logic that sustains the story’s trajectory. This logic is lacking in The Tiger’s Wife. It can’t be   allegory as one has to try very hard to locate its political landscape; it can’t be a fable for it neither challenges nor arrives at universal truth. It is a pretty story, written in picturesque prose, a delicious read on a rainy afternoon; but for all its magic, surprisingly evanescent.

One detail alone makes it memorable: it won the Orange Prize this year.

— Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed write as Kalpish Ratna