The suggested reading list at the end of this book says a lot: One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Jungle Book; City of the Beasts; Ghostwritten and The Fall of Yugoslavia. The Tiger’s Wife does a great job of creating a country preoccupied with death. The reality and the threat of death are presented as the lasting preoccupations of a country waiting for then split in two by war. The old lean on superstitions and the young are made lazy and self-indulgent by it.
Both young and old are inflicted with a kind of debilitating knowledge that knowledge, information, action, persistence and motivation may all amount to nothing when war – and death – keeps looming and lingering. Superstition, nihilism, or just plain apathy, might work just as well, so the characters inhabit a country where omens and crayon sketches matter just as much as the injections and inoculations brought by our earnest central character: Natalia. Like a few of the books in her suggested reading list, Obreht’s story is, I think, a great evocation of a magically different country, in this case one which is almost afflicted with its melancholy, superstitious difference.
Both young and old are inflicted with a kind of debilitating knowledge that knowledge, information, action, persistence and motivation may all amount to nothing when war – and death – keeps looming and lingering. Superstition, nihilism, or just plain apathy, might work just as well, so the characters inhabit a country where omens and crayon sketches matter just as much as the injections and inoculations brought by our earnest central character: Natalia. Like a few of the books in her suggested reading list, Obreht’s story is, I think, a great evocation of a magically different country, in this case one which is almost afflicted with its melancholy, superstitious difference.
And there’s some great writing in it. The opening scene of a tiger mauling a zookeeper combines the sudden shock of the act with the shocking ordinariness of seeing it – of being an observer and not a participant.
The thing I found weird, in amongst this great evocation of a country and its history and some slightly patchy but often great writing, was that the most interesting character is, structurally, three levels down. Every review I read both raved about this book and mentioned the deathless man. Understandably: he’s the most captivating and interesting character in the book; in an odd way, he’s its main character; he’s the character Natalia’s grandfather is going to see when he dies and the one Natalia ends up looking for herself. She gradually reveals to us the stories of the deathless man her grandfather told her over the years, and this is largely how we get to know him (both her grandfather and the deathless man himself). But there it is: we get from Natalia stories about her grandfather telling us stories about the deathless man. The deathless man is clear – he is youthful; he wants water; he cannot die; he is infinitely patient and composed. Compared with him, I found Natalia and her grandfather both a little foggy. I know them in some way: they were both searchers; both stubborn about wanting to do the right thing even when others had different views on what the right thing was; I know that routines gave him something old people are supposed to want; I know she was capable of being secretive and seeing that as somehow necessary. I know the world they live in, where a deaf mute women who was being beaten by her gay husband would safely befriend an escaped tiger, or a family would try to cure sickness by digging in a vineyard to recover the remains of a relative left buried there during the war, or the deathless man would come to help people die.
(I liked the flourish of her storytelling, but I got sick of everything being explained by whatever happened in the past, by the way.)
But I came out of this book like I’d returned from a holiday in a foreign country where I hadn’t met anyone. I’d heard about people; I’d seen the buildings, and gone inside and looked at the paintings, I’d even read my Rough Guide until pages fell out and drifted down the river outside that 300 year old museum that was bombed in the war; I just hadn’t actually spoken to anyone. Natalia and her grandfather weren’t characters I ended up knowing or caring about that much: I wanted her to find out stuff because I’d invested time and energy in her journey, but I didn’t care for her sake. The grandfather wanted to meet the deathless man one more time before he died, and maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. I think he did, and I think Natalia ended up thinking he did, but really, I’m not too fussed either way. He still ended up dying when I wasn’t around, and making his wife agonize about his death, his belongings and his soul’s passage to the whatever more than she needed to, and I’m not sure why, other than that he was a little bit vain and uncaring. Not a lot; he wasn’t a monster (which may have been interesting), in fact he seemed like a pretty good guy. Maybe I’d like to meet him; but unfortunately, he’s dead, and Natalia – well – she’s not as interesting as the stories she’s heard about. And that’s great; it’s just not that great.