The Tiger's Wife

In a lecture Richard Hugo gave his creative writing students, he cautioned against conforming music to truth. The alternative, he went on, of conforming truth to music, was not failsafe but the better choice. I’ve been thinking about this palindrome lesson, music to truth versus truth to music; how the sweet spot of music and truth together is what makes that magic resonance. I wonder all the time if I can be honest enough to submit to Hugo’s advice, to know what I’m saying first instead of going lemur-like off the cliff.

Much has been made about Tea Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40.  She is young! All the critics have noted this, that she is twenty-five and I can’t really wrap my head around that fact either. The Tiger’s Wife is an incredible book. It’s lyrical and deeply felt. The book follows a Natalia, a young doctor, as she travels to a remote village to immunize children living in an orphanage. The setting is likely Obreht’s native Serbia and the effects of war are still felt around Natalia as she crosses foreign borders. Her grandfather, with whom she shared a close bond, has suddenly died and the circumstances of his death are unsettling. Secretly terminally ill, Natalia’s grandfather had traveled to a remote village to die, without a word to the family. But why? Natalia believes he was in pursuit of a deathless man, a man that her grandfather had once known. Over the course of the book, Natalia remembers her grandfather’s life. In particular, she recalls two fables that form a map, a sort of compass, to his life and death. One story is that of the deathless man. The other is about the tiger’s wife.

The thing that is so incredible about this book is that Obreht writes naturally, without chasing music, without chasing truth. And her detailing of relationship between girl and grandfather, between child and community, between believer and non-believer is stunning and honest. We see her grandfather as someone deserving of his granddaughter’s deep love but we also see him as an elderly man, stubborn, romantic, sometimes foolish. Natalia’s own travels and her meditation on her grandfather’s stories are threads that come together loosely. The pieces may intimate a whole but the story is not seamless. It’s better that way. The fables and Natalia’s experience in an alien town are sourced from an elusive kind of magic. Magic is the perfect foil to make a story whole without muscling the pieces together. But the binding magic of this story is the depth of the narrator’s voice. It’s clear and uncomplicated, musical and true.