The tiger's wife

If, like me, you are a fan of Latin American magical realism novels then I think that Téa Obreht's Balkan addition to the genre will be right up your street. I had high hopes for The Tiger's Wife, having already been blown away by Obreht's more recent work, Inland, and I'm delighted that The Tiger's Wife didn't disappoint me at all. The epic storyline encompasses three generations of a family in the former Yugoslavia, crossing the newly instigated border between countries separated by the civil war. It also occasionally looks back as far as the Second World War and beyond reminding us that this part of Europe is regularly subject to violent upheavals and mistrust between its peoples. Deftly woven in to this narrative are two folklore fairytales, each told as if they are equally true, yet with aspects that (almost definitely) could not have really happened. Or, perhaps, in the case of the eponymous Tiger's Wife at least, there is a strong thread of truth.

I was completely captivated by this ambitious, meandering novel. The Tiger's Wife is not an easy read, but I found it to be a compelling one. I could recognise why it was an award-winning work on its publication a decade ago and its themes of alienation, isolation and communities turning a blind eye to intolerance are sadly still just as relevant everywhere. Téa Obreht writes with incredible grace and poise, a natural storyteller who pitched and paced her tales in such a way as to keep me gripped from the first page to the last.

An oddly small group. Me and Susan and another Susan, and Heidi, who really works at Hollywood but spent the day here subbing, and was drafted into facilitating this group when Kim went home with the nasty cold that's going around. She hadn't actually read the book, so part of the time we were explaining plot and characters and what-not to her.

Susan had problems with the book, partly because she knew the area and felt the need to pin all of the locations to their proper places. Despite the fact that Obreht purposefully shuffled around the names and places, to try to make it more universal, and not tied to a particular war in a particular country. The other Susan immersed herself in it (having read it in the course of two days) and reveled in the sense of place that she found in it. I loved it as an example of story-telling, a tangled skein of threads interweaving generations back. And Heidi decided that Hollywood would just have to read it next year.

Looking back on the books I've read in the last year or two I've come to realize that I'm not a fan of books that are beautifully written and meticulously constructed but that don't seem to grab me and hold my interest in terms of storytelling. I need more from a book than just virtuous writing craft; I need compelling narrative.

Which is why this is, for me, a three-star book. The writing itself is wonderfully crafted, and especially impressive given the youth of the author and that this is her first novel. Many of the images and characters and stories that Obreht creates in this book are spectacularly beautiful and well-drawn, with a magical otherwordly quality: the deathless man, the family digging holes looking for an unmarked grave, the tiger's wife of the title. But the stories interleave and move back and forth in time somewhat confusingly and the plot never seems to connect in a meaningful way. I was left with a feeling of distance from this book, as if I was gazing on something wondrous that I was not allowed to stand too close to for fear of breaking it or maybe even getting germs on it. Beautiful but unsatisfying.