The Tiger's Wife
Ratings24
Average rating3.2
Meh. I take full responsibility for the two-star rating. Perhaps this is a lovely book (I certainly enjoyed some lovely moments in it), but I read it on a series of flights around the country for internship interviews. So the switches from present realism to past parables felt disjointed, and I kept wondering why Obreht wasn't giving us more of the narrator's here-and-now, as opposed to using her as the vehicle for retelling tales. Given the glowing critical acclaim plastered all over the cover, I personally may have just missed the nuance.
I liked this book. It was not how I expected it to be. It was still very enjoyable.
I loved parts of it, and the writing is lovely. But as a whole it didn't keep me engaged. There are at least 3 separate stories here, and they felt too separate, although each has its own appeal.
My Serbia book around the world.
The actual cool stuff about the history and all that got very lost on weird stuff about the tiger which was maybe just too deep for me but I was not into it.
I couldn't wait to read The Tiger's Wife. I'd read a thousand rave reviews on a thousand blogs and I knew it was going to be the best book of the year. I knew that Tea Obreht had been invited to speak in Houston this coming spring and I knew that was because her book was the best book of the year.
It was a good story, with interesting twists and turns in the plot that keep one reading along and with enough intelligence to hook the better readers. The elements of magic realism in this book had enough novelty to surprise a reader.
But this book did not capture my heart. I liked it well enough to finish it, but I don't have enough enthusiasm for it to recommend it heartily to others.
Then again, that has been true for all of the adult novels I've read that have been published this year. All have been good but not excellent. None of them won my heart. Good enough for a coffee date, but not for a date on Saturday night.
This was beautifully written but not really my cup of tea?
My manager & I both had to read it for the library's adult book club, and when we were planning for it she said, “What did you think of it?” and I said, “I'm still trying to figure out what happened, and how I feel about it?” and she said “Thank God, I thought I was the only one.”
I'm not going to chime in with all the praise that's been heaped on this novel. Frankly, it was a struggle to get through. I made myself finish it. The story is narrated by a young doctor named Natalie in a Balkan country dealing with the after effects of war. She tells the story of her recently departed grandfather and the stories that were central to his life. But really I found the story to be very disjointed. At times it was interesting but at others it was dull, plodding, overly descriptive stuff. I found very little of the story to be compelling and after about a third of the way in, I wasn't really in the mood to continue. I thought it might get better. Mostly it left me a little confused and apathetic. She is a good writer, though, but a more cohesive plot line was lacking.
It feels like a loose collection of European short stories bordering on fable.
Darisa the Bear, the greatest of hunters in the old kingdom who in his youth practised taxidermy at night to keep Death there among the dead cats and small animals he worked on. He was long to master the craft but was otherwise intent on keeping Death from wandering the house and alighting on his sickly older sister.
Or there was Luka the butcher who in his youth longed only to master the single stringed Balkan folk instrument the gusla. Seeking a chaste marriage to appease their respective families he would, through a string of seemingly random events, become the monstrous wife-beater the city of Galina quietly ignored.
The Deathless Man, Gavran Gaile who could read the arc of other people's lives in their coffee ground. And of course, the Tiger's Wife.
But while they may feel like the remembered old stories spun from an aging man, his granddaughter the narrator Natalia finds herself amidst her own strange world. An old monastery with families of sickly gravediggers, lavender pouches tied around their necks in fraying ribbon, searching the vineyards looking for a long buried cousin and the phrase “wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”
Within each world I find myself engrossed but constantly stumbling to regain my footing in between each section, wishing for some stronger connective tissue that might better bind these disparate elements together.