Folklore and Three Generations of War

There is something so extraordinary about Tea Obreht's exquisite novel, The Tiger's Wife, set in what was once Yugoslavia over the course of WWI, WWII, and the recent wars that resulted in its dissection into new territories. War forms an continuous backdrop throughout the novel, often as a distant but deeply felt anxiety and sometimes exploding on the community. Boundaries shift with conflict and "our city," or "our fields" abruptly become someone else's property. Identities shift too as the long married wife whose origin, faith, or language suddenly mark her as an enemy to the new state.

Against the constant threat of violence, the characters struggle to retain their humanity, their customs, and their hopes for a future. Some succeed -- though success here is measured more by how well one clings to a belief in human dignity and family. Some fail and become swallowed in fairy-tale fashion by the monsters of the day.

Nadia, the novel's protagonist, is a young pediatrician who sets out on a perilous journey, crossing newly minted borders to understand the reasons for her beloved grandfather's strange disappearance and death alone in a remote village. She also searches for the origin of the "tiger's wife," a story that has haunted her grandfather since childhood. In addition to Nadia's journey, the novel crisscrosses the country with multiple tales of other characters, weaving together a complex narrative of an ethnically diverse country.

The novel also includes the use of local folktales and iconic figures -- especially the Deathless Man who reappears to the grandfather throughout the novel. And though the Deathless Man is a harbinger of death, he is oddly gentile, almost kind when compared to the random brutality of the wars. The tiger's wife, a terrified mute girl, is given strength by her unlikely friendship with a tiger who has become a refugee from a bombed out zoo. A band of poor villagers and their ailing children travel to a coastal vineyard to dig for the remains of compatriot, hastily stashed in a suitcase and buried during the last conflagration because they believe they can never be healthy until they properly honor their dead and bring him home.

Obrecht's writing is elegant -- spare but filled with surprising beauty and precision when describing the landscape whether the mythic woods, decaying villages, or the eeriness of an elephant appearing on a city street during a night of bombing. But I would have to say that among the most powerful passages for me (and there are many here!) is this one, a reflection by the grandfather of the price of continuous war. It describes so many places in our world today and is the spine on which Nadia's and all the characters' stories are built:

"But now, in the country's last hour it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the cease-fire had provided the delusion of normalcy, but never peace. When your fight has purpose -- to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent--it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling -- when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event -- there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it."

For a more detailed review of this novel, I recommend Lisa Schillinger's "A Mythic Novel of the Balkan Wars" in the NYT Book Review.