The Tigers Wife

The Tiger’s Wife is the first novel by Serbian-born American author, Tea Obrecht, and is the winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Young doctor, Natalia Stefanovic is on an assignment with her life-long friend Zora to innoculate the children of a remote Balkan village orphanage when she learns of her grandfather’s death. Her grandmother believes he was on his way to meet Natalia, is distraught that he died alone in a town none of them recognises, and that his belongings are missing. As she tries to come to terms with the loss of a man who loomed large in her life, Natalia is distracted from her medical duties by memories of her grandfather and also by the strange digging activities in a nearby vineyard. Obrecht employs three narrative strands: Natalia relates what happens on her vaccination excursion; her grandfather, a well-respected doctor, tells of his three encounters with a deathless man; and Natalia chronicles the events of a certain winter in World War Two, when the village her grandfather grew up in was visited by a tiger. In each of the narrations, secondary characters are elegantly given backstories so that a collection of short stories is seamlessly woven into the whole. Obrecht’s characters are interesting and authentic and her descriptive prose is wonderfully evocative: “Pigeons, clustered thick enough to be visible from the hill, shuffled like cowled women up and down the street..” Against a backdrop of seemingly ever-present war, Obrecht explores superstitions and customs, secrets and lies, fears and rituals, history and folklore, myths and mysteries, love and revenge, and of course, death. This moving and thought-provoking novel is an amazing debut. Readers will look forward to more from Obrecht.

This novel is set in an unidentified Balkan country that is recovering from an internal war which has split the country. The heroine, Natalia, is a young doctor who has been heavily influenced throughout her life by her grandfather, who is also a doctor. When her grandfather dies, Natalia is thrown into a fit of remembrance of her many experiences with her grandfather. Half of these memories are fables of a contemporary sort; e.g., he has told her a story of a man who cannot die. His fascination with tigers was passed on to her in a love of The Jungle Book and Shere Kahn. After her grandfather’s death, Natalia finds out that an even more fabulous story, involving a tiger, has happened to him in the past, the story of the Tiger’s Wife. This book is an interesting mix of contemporary science and history with the village legends of the Balkan countryside.