Monthly Archives: June 2011

Congrats to Tea Obreht for winning Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction today. I just finished her debut novel “The Tiger’s Wife” and thought it might win the award, which nets her about $46,200 and a bronze statue.

I didn’t know much about “Tiger’s Wife” before I started it besides hearing of its praises. But don’t confuse it with Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” book, that’s a whole different cup of tea! There are quite a few tigers in books these days. Remember Booker Prize-winning “White Tiger” or Life of Pi”? The latter will come to the big screen next year.

“The Tiger’s Wife” is a bit hard to fully describe. It’s set in an unnamed Balkan country that’s been through years of war. The main character, Natalia, is a doctor on a mission to inoculate orphans in a far-off town, where diggers are looking for a body in the fields. But on the way, she learns that her beloved grandfather has died on travels away from home. She begins to investigate why he has journeyed to the place where he was found. Along the way she unravels tales about her grandfather of the “deathless man” and the “tiger’s wife,” which help her understand him better and what he was up to at the time of his death.

The stories of the deathless man and the tiger’s wife make up threads that run throughout the book alongside the one of Natalia in the present. I found myself caught up in these mythic-like tales of a man doomed to immortality and a deaf-mute woman who befriends a tiger.

It’s not a totally easy beach read; you have to concentrate especially toward the end when the threads come to a close. It bogs down a bit in places, but also creates a vivid image of the Balkans and the coming to grips of the dead.

Obreht is a skillful storyteller; while reading along, I couldn’t believe the author is only 25; it was a bit astonishing in fact. No wonder Obreht, a Serbian-American, is being hailed as the next big literary deal. If you’re wondering: she started college at 16 and graduate school at 20 and wrote the book in a few years at eight hours a day (from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.). Good luck doing that. Continue reading →