The Tiger's Wife
The book is narrated by Natalia, a doctor working with orphans. Her grandfather, a doctor, has recently died, but he was in a city where no one knew he was. Natalia goes off to gather his possessions, and recalls his life as a boy in the town of Galina, as well as the three encounters he has with a man who can not die.
The deathless man, though not in the title, is the anchor of the book. In a land where death is so omnipresent, he is a starting apparition. He tells the grandfather that he was cursed by his uncle, who is none other than Death himself. The grandfather does not believe him, and ties him with a rope and stones and sinks him in a lake. Even before he was shot and arose at his own funeral, asking for water. "It is a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo has done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice."
The other story, about the tiger's wife, takes up more pages. It starts with an escaped tiger from a zoo, presumably during World War II. It hides out in the forest around Galina. Obreht's writing is strongest when she relates the story of the tiger: "He had been born in box of hay in a gypsy circus, and had spent his life feeding on fat white columns of spine in the citadel cage. For the first time, the impulse that made him flex his claws in his sleep, the compulsion that led him to drag his meat to the corner of the cage he occupied alone, was articulated into something other than frustration. Necessity drew him slowly out of his domesticated clumsiness. It strengthened and reinforced the building blocks of his nature, honed his languid, feline reflexes; and the long-lost Siberian instinct pulled him north, into the cold."
Grandfather, as a boy, sees the tiger in the town's smokehouse, with the deaf-mute and much physically abused wife of the local butcher. When she becomes pregnant, the town believes she has mated with the tiger, and carries the devil's child, and becomes known as the tiger's wife. Grandfather and his mother treat her kindly, though, even helping her escape from a hunter, Darisa, who is said to be man and bear.
These tales, suffused with myth, are contrasted with the current day, and also the period of war during the Balkans during the 1990s. At the town of Sarabor, Grandfather meets the deathless man, just before it is to be bombed. The deathless man knows that the elderly waiter of the restaurant where they meet will die. Grandfather thinks he should be told, so he can spend his last moments with his family, but the deathless man disagrees. Later, Natalia will have her own meeting with this man, after her grandfather's death, and writing is so good that I almost held my breath while reading it.
I did find some fault with the book, though. It's not an ideal book for putting down and picking up a few days later, as I sometimes lost my place with what was going with Natalia after the long stories from the past. But it's still a very good read, exemplified by stirring passages of poetic writing. The book closes this way: "There is, however, and always has been, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here, a large flat slab of stone where the sun is always cast. My grandfather's tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger's wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore." Lovely.
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