Imaginative Balkan tales
By Liesl Schillinger |
March 13, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
Think back to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, with their profusion of names that are difficult to pronounce and acts that are painful to recall: the massacres at Brcko and Srebrenica, the bombing of bread lines in Sarajevo, the destruction of Mostar's 400-year-old bridge. None of these appear in Ta Obreht's first novel, "The Tiger's Wife," yet in its pages she brings their historic and human context to luminous life. With fables and allegories, as well as events borrowed from the headlines, she illustrates the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence that pervade the region even in times of peace. Reaching back to World War II, and then to wars that came before, she reveals the continuity beneath the clangor.
The principal collector of Obreht's multiplicity of stories is her narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century. Natalia likes to see herself as somebody with an edge: too rational to be cowed by old-fashioned superstitions, too modern for corny old-fashioned folk music. She prefers Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
As a little girl, Natalia adored her grandfather, a respected doctor and professor, and tagged along on his regular visits to the zoo, which was formerly a sultan's fortress. "Past the aviary where the sharp-eared owls sleep," they would walk to the moat where tigers loped, their "stripe-lashed shoulders rolling." There she would listen, rapt, as her grandfather spoke of a girl he once knew who was known as the "tiger's wife." At the time, Natalia thought this was a fairy tale. After all, her grandfather always carried a copy of Kipling's "Jungle Book" in his breast pocket. To his granddaughter, he was a fount of fantasy, her own private bard. In "The Tiger's Wife," Obreht weaves the old man's richly colored reminiscences like silk ribbons through the spare frame of Natalia's modern coming-of-age, a coming-of-age that coincides, as her grandfather's had, with a time of political upheaval.
When Natalia is a teenager, war returns to the Balkans. The zoo closes, and a curfew is imposed. Natalia and her friends immerse themselves in "the mild lawlessness" that surrounds them. Among other things, this means spurning her grandfather and dating a young tough who sells black-market contraband.
Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes Natalia's matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen. Soon after the war, the adult Natalia adds to this trove as she travels with a fellow doctor on a mercy mission to a town across the new border to inoculate orphans - orphans who have been created, she knows, "by our own soldiers."
Natalia also comes to learn that the tiger's wife was a real person who lived in the village of Galina, the birthplace of Natalia's grandfather. Arrestingly, Obreht shows that you don't have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime if a gifted observer is on hand to record it.
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of seven, before the major conflict took hold. She lived in Cyprus and Egypt, then moved to the United States in 1997. In other words, she did not live in the former Yugoslavia during the war-torn years this book revisits. Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, "The Tiger's Wife" is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.
For Obreht, the mind's witness is more than equal to the eye's. And her narrator, in retelling the experiences of her grandfather's generation, enfolds them into her own. As his vision joins hers, old and new memories collide in a vibrant collage that has no date, no dateline.
The principal collector of Obreht's multiplicity of stories is her narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century. Natalia likes to see herself as somebody with an edge: too rational to be cowed by old-fashioned superstitions, too modern for corny old-fashioned folk music. She prefers Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
As a little girl, Natalia adored her grandfather, a respected doctor and professor, and tagged along on his regular visits to the zoo, which was formerly a sultan's fortress. "Past the aviary where the sharp-eared owls sleep," they would walk to the moat where tigers loped, their "stripe-lashed shoulders rolling." There she would listen, rapt, as her grandfather spoke of a girl he once knew who was known as the "tiger's wife." At the time, Natalia thought this was a fairy tale. After all, her grandfather always carried a copy of Kipling's "Jungle Book" in his breast pocket. To his granddaughter, he was a fount of fantasy, her own private bard. In "The Tiger's Wife," Obreht weaves the old man's richly colored reminiscences like silk ribbons through the spare frame of Natalia's modern coming-of-age, a coming-of-age that coincides, as her grandfather's had, with a time of political upheaval.
When Natalia is a teenager, war returns to the Balkans. The zoo closes, and a curfew is imposed. Natalia and her friends immerse themselves in "the mild lawlessness" that surrounds them. Among other things, this means spurning her grandfather and dating a young tough who sells black-market contraband.
Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes Natalia's matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen. Soon after the war, the adult Natalia adds to this trove as she travels with a fellow doctor on a mercy mission to a town across the new border to inoculate orphans - orphans who have been created, she knows, "by our own soldiers."
Natalia also comes to learn that the tiger's wife was a real person who lived in the village of Galina, the birthplace of Natalia's grandfather. Arrestingly, Obreht shows that you don't have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime if a gifted observer is on hand to record it.
Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of seven, before the major conflict took hold. She lived in Cyprus and Egypt, then moved to the United States in 1997. In other words, she did not live in the former Yugoslavia during the war-torn years this book revisits. Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, "The Tiger's Wife" is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.
For Obreht, the mind's witness is more than equal to the eye's. And her narrator, in retelling the experiences of her grandfather's generation, enfolds them into her own. As his vision joins hers, old and new memories collide in a vibrant collage that has no date, no dateline.
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