Book review - The Tiger's Wife

(The Times of India Crest Edition, August 19, 2011)

THE TIGER’S WIFE
Tea Obrecht

A book is generally the sum of its parts. There is the story, the characters, the development of the plot, the point of view, the overall coherence and, of course, the writing itself go a long way to making a book readable, buyable and, eventually successful. Once in a while, the entire package comes together beautifully, and you, as reader, will not just buy the book, but read it over and over again for the sheer pleasure of imbibing something worth owning. But sometimes a book comes along which makes sense in a strange way, for just the experience of being something different, with a story that is so unlike the norm, characters that make sense but are obviously not anyone you would know well and all in a setting that is unusual, magical, enjoyable. The writing may not be the best. The language may not be the most refined or evolved or even adult. The various parts could be disjointed and not all of a high quality. But the book does well, the critics love it and you, as reader, like it without being sure what is wrong with it, though you know there is something off-kilter. But, frankly, you don’t really care.

This is what happens with The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obrecht. The story is amazingly interesting, enchanting, casting a rarely used spell with its out-of-the-ordinary progress. It begins with the small girl-child Natalia being taken to the zoo by her grandfather. They have food for the animals, from cabbage heads for the hippos to sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the carriage, but what they really head for is the tiger cage. And, as they watch, the dustpan keeper is attacked by one of the big striped cats, his arm mauled and bleeding, a matter of shame for the man and frustration for the animal. When she grows up, Natalia becomes a doctor in the big city, like her grandfather was. All through her life – she ‘speaks’ when she is over 60 – the tiger has been a major influence on her family, somehow deeply connected to the copy of the Jungle Book that her grandfather has always kept, no matter what the circumstances.

Natalia is on her way to a seaside town orphanage somewhere in the Balkans to treat the children there when she is told that her grandfather has mysteriously passed away. The young doctor chases up the reason for his death, by going back along the path that he too while he was alive, going through the stories he had told her, the places they had been to together, the small pleasures that they had shared in the process. And along the way there are two stories that always resurface – of a tiger escaped from the zoo which prowled around the fictional village of Galina, and the ‘deathless man’ who is fated to live on in spite of whatever is done to him. The deathless man and the tiger walk side by side with Natalia’s grandfather through his life, whimsically appearing and vanishing in a complex puzzle that the reader tries to unravel as the story unfolds.

The tale has a special magic, the characters played out, the bonds strong, though lacking emotional depth and perhaps endurance, even the clichés making sense in their positions. Most of all it is the imagination of the author that carries most weight, making her well deserving of the applause that has come her way since the book was published. It is not an easy book to read, but it is well worth the effort.