I picked up Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife because Jere brought it home from the library and I was in between books at the time. Jere always makes fun of me for not reading any modern fiction, and I had asked the internet for fiction recommendations and gotten approximately zero responses (unfair -- my aunt did recommend a couple of authors, I'd just already read them), so there I was. I did not have many expectations, although I did know, from Jere and from the cover blurb, that Obreht was a young up-and-comer darling of the New Yorker. I thought it was enh, okay, good for a first novel but I probably wouldn't go out of my way to look her up in the future. Of course, yesterday she became the youngest author to with the Orange Prize for Fiction, so that goes to show how much I don't know what I'm talking about.
The Tiger's Wife is not a very good novel, but it does have some good stories in it. The main character, Natalia, has just heard about her grandfather's death, and reminisces about some experiences that they had together and some stories that he had told her (with some of the details pieced together by her at some unspecified time after the scope of the book to make the accounts more omniscient in narration). The stories are multi-layered tales (insert obligatory matryoshka doll reference here on account of the book being set in an unnamed, until recently wartorn Balkan country; or, better yet, call it a needle inside an egg inside a duck inside a rabbit inside an iron chest buried under a green oak tree) which have a folkloric/magic realism feel to them. They are mostly fun and interesting except where they run up against the 'reality' of the novel; because folklore is actively anti-depth when it comes to characters, and novels are necessarily pro-depth when it comes to characters, so synching the two forms up smoothly can be like trying to roller-skate on shag carpet with velcro wheels.
The biggest difficulty I had with the novel is that Natalia is just a mouthpiece for her grandfather's stories -- which could have been a statement about the Balkans, or could have been an interesting thing to subvert with an awesomely unreliable narrator, but sadly, no. Natalia is a cipher, and her own story is pretty non-existent and pointless; she's mostly a vessel for his memories. This ties into the second-biggest difficulty I had, which is that all of the women characters exist only to motivate the men: my wife is from 'Sarobor', so I will be sad and moved when it's being decimated; my sister is dying so I will spend my life trying to arrest death; I met a girl who inspired me to defy my uncle and ultimately doom myself. The absolute worst of the bunch is the titular Tiger's Wife -- a deaf, mute girl with no name who is simultaneously the inspiration for and the victim of everyone and everything. Ugh.
I will spare you the rant about how the reasons I didn't like The Tiger's Wife are probably the reasons why it's getting so much attention and approval. It is mostly a readable book, and you should give it a try yourself. If you generally like modern fiction you will probably love it.
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