The Tiger's Wife

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.

This book is basically loosely (very loosely) connected by three separate tales–the modern day protagonist dealing with her grandfather's death, the tale of the Tiger's Wife, and the tale of the Deathless Man. I found the Tiger's Wife bits very engaging, but the rest of the novel was very slow and I just couldn't quite get into it. I thought about giving up around the 100-page mark, but then the Tiger's Wife substory began in earnest, and I was intrigued and thought “things will pick up now.” They didn't. But kudos to Obreht (or her editor) for being clever enough to tease more bits every other chapter to keep me plodding through the rest of it. Ultimately I don't feel like my patience was rewarded. I'm left wondering what Obreht's main message really was. She's definitely a talented writer, and there were a few wow moments, but I never quite cared about any of the characters, aside from the Tiger. I'm a bit puzzled at all the critical acclaim this novel has received, but perhaps it falls into the Gabriel Garcia Marquez category for me–authors almost everyone in the world loves but me.

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.

Eh. It was good and then it just petered out. Nothing spectacular.

The Tiger's Wife has 3 major narratives and a 4th that is more of a side story. The encompassing story is the first person one told by Natalia, and the other stories are woven (very well, I must add) into the main narrative. The reader learns very early in the book that Natalia's grandfather has died from a terminal cancer. When she learns about this, she is on her way to Brejevina to provide vaccinations for children in a monastery turned orphanage. This is the book's primary narrative, but the author writes a few other stories that need to be told.Another story is that of the deathless man. He's a man that doesn't/can't die. Natalia's grandfather meets him before he's married to her grandmother, and he tells Natalia the story. The third major story is that of the Tiger and the Tiger's Wife. The Tiger escapes the zoo when Natalia's grandfather is nine years old, and he travels eventually to the town in which grandfather lived his childhood.This book has a lot of different themes for readers to explore, and fortunately, [a:Tea Obreht 5391851 Tea Obreht http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]'s narrative style is beautifully mesmerizing. In the tales of the deathless man and the Tiger, the author tells stories of several characters from grandfather's childhood in a wonderful folk-telling way. We learn about the butcher, the past of the deathless man, and the apothecary. Each of these stories is a folk tale that could easily hold its own as a short story. This really pulled me into the novel because I never knew what to expect each time I picked it up for more reading, and I really liked that!Some of the themes to discover include the obvious one of war. The novel takes place in an unnamed Balkan country. Although names are given for the various towns in the book, I couldn't find that any of them are real, so I suppose they are based on real towns the author is familiar with. This part of the world has been ravaged by war. Just war, not a few wars here and there, but constant war. As grandfather puts it in a conversation with the deathless man: “This war never ends...It was there when I was a child and it will be here for my children's children. I came to Sarabor because I want to see it again before it dies...” I think the author's choice to leave out the exact location of the stories is a good one, and as a reader, I came to realize that the stories could take place in several Balkan countries.Some other themes include the question of our desire to find out when we're going to die: would you want to know? This question is explored throughout the book. A lot of animal symbolism and folkloric practices are presented, too.I really enjoyed this book. I must admit, however, that I was the only one in my book club who finished it. Everyone else did not, and the reasoning was simply that they weren't intrigued by the stories, didn't have anything invested in the characters. To me, this is not a book about the individual characters of Natalia, her friend Zora, or her grandfather. It's more a story about events that shaped their lives, and the author really leaves it up to the reader to figure out the effect those events really had.The only thing that disappointed me about this book was that I can say I didn't really get it until I read the interview at the end between [a:Jennifer Egan 49625 Jennifer Egan http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1231143470p2/49625.jpg] and [a:Tea Obreht 5391851 Tea Obreht http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]. Those 10 pages were very Ah-Ha moments for me. I'm more disappointed in myself than the author for my inability to really understand the book without the author's nudging, and I'm so glad it's a part of my Kindle edition.

Reminded me a little bit of The Historian, one of my favorites.