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#5 Platform: The Tiger's Wife
Sep. 29th, 2012 01:14 amTigers where you don't normally expect to find tigers are the best tigers.
Book #32: The Tiger's Wife
Author: Tea Obreht
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
Your damning with faint praise section of the review: for a book that I had to take three runs at to actually get through, the Tiger's Wife was actually pretty good.
I'm not really exactly sure what it was about the book that made it hard for me to get into, to be honest. The story setup itself is pretty interesting; set in an unnamed Balkan country after the end of a long period of war, our main character Natalia and her friend Zora are traveling across the new border to make use of their medical skills to give vaccinations to some kids in an orphanage. En route, she finds out that her grandfather, who helped raise her and was a large part of her life growing up, has died, away from home, in a place she's never even really heard of. Over the rest of the book, we find out more about her and her relationship with him, the two odd situations in which he found himself over his life, and more of the nature of the war-torn country.
Okay, so all of this sounds fine, and the storyline is put together nicely, weaving between tales of Natalia's life during the war, her present mission, and the two rather magical tales from her grandfather, of the Tiger's Wife and the Deathless Man, and how they bounded his existence. These are nice - a tiger escaped during some bombing in the capital, and found the village her grandfather grew up in, forming a seemingly mystical connection with a deaf-mute girl there. The Deathless Man is pretty much exactly what you think - a man he came across in a small village who could never die... but could still grow quite thirsty. Both of these stories are fleshed out well, and the connections into Natalia's story, learning of her grandfather's past and how he met his end, are well done, too. I also liked the atmosphere and the telling of the stories - it was never clear exactly whether we were to take this magic at face value or not, which was nice.
And still this sounds fine enough, so what was the problem? I think that while Obreht is clearly a talented writer - she's evocative and urgent, and she can give you characters a new spotlight that really changes your view of them, setting everything you knew of them into relief, no easy skill - she's also still more uneven than one would want. I got into the characters and the stories, but then it drifted away; it was hard to read into it at the beginning as the story set up, and there were points along the way where I got lost as well. This is despite the connections between the stories and the presentation; it just sometimes really felt like a chore to get through the next part, but I still wanted to get further, to find out the web and the end. Maybe if I knew more of the country at hand, I'd have done better; I'm no Balkan expert. I don't think that was it, though.
On the whole, this was still a pretty enjoyable book, a very promising first novel, and something I don't regret trying, or even regret trying thrice. I'll probably check out more of her work in the future, too. I don't know if I'd recommend specifically jumping on this one, but the high points are pretty high, for what that's worth. Not glowing praise is still praise, after all.
Next up: Uh. Thinking Anna and the French Kiss, but we'll see.
Book #32: The Tiger's Wife
Author: Tea Obreht
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
Your damning with faint praise section of the review: for a book that I had to take three runs at to actually get through, the Tiger's Wife was actually pretty good.
I'm not really exactly sure what it was about the book that made it hard for me to get into, to be honest. The story setup itself is pretty interesting; set in an unnamed Balkan country after the end of a long period of war, our main character Natalia and her friend Zora are traveling across the new border to make use of their medical skills to give vaccinations to some kids in an orphanage. En route, she finds out that her grandfather, who helped raise her and was a large part of her life growing up, has died, away from home, in a place she's never even really heard of. Over the rest of the book, we find out more about her and her relationship with him, the two odd situations in which he found himself over his life, and more of the nature of the war-torn country.
Okay, so all of this sounds fine, and the storyline is put together nicely, weaving between tales of Natalia's life during the war, her present mission, and the two rather magical tales from her grandfather, of the Tiger's Wife and the Deathless Man, and how they bounded his existence. These are nice - a tiger escaped during some bombing in the capital, and found the village her grandfather grew up in, forming a seemingly mystical connection with a deaf-mute girl there. The Deathless Man is pretty much exactly what you think - a man he came across in a small village who could never die... but could still grow quite thirsty. Both of these stories are fleshed out well, and the connections into Natalia's story, learning of her grandfather's past and how he met his end, are well done, too. I also liked the atmosphere and the telling of the stories - it was never clear exactly whether we were to take this magic at face value or not, which was nice.
And still this sounds fine enough, so what was the problem? I think that while Obreht is clearly a talented writer - she's evocative and urgent, and she can give you characters a new spotlight that really changes your view of them, setting everything you knew of them into relief, no easy skill - she's also still more uneven than one would want. I got into the characters and the stories, but then it drifted away; it was hard to read into it at the beginning as the story set up, and there were points along the way where I got lost as well. This is despite the connections between the stories and the presentation; it just sometimes really felt like a chore to get through the next part, but I still wanted to get further, to find out the web and the end. Maybe if I knew more of the country at hand, I'd have done better; I'm no Balkan expert. I don't think that was it, though.
On the whole, this was still a pretty enjoyable book, a very promising first novel, and something I don't regret trying, or even regret trying thrice. I'll probably check out more of her work in the future, too. I don't know if I'd recommend specifically jumping on this one, but the high points are pretty high, for what that's worth. Not glowing praise is still praise, after all.
Next up: Uh. Thinking Anna and the French Kiss, but we'll see.
