The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past—the schools and dormitories of its youth, army barracks and tenements, houses razed to the ground and rebuilt, places that recall love and guilt, difficulties and unbridled happiness, optimism and ecstasy, memories of grace meaningless to anyone else—and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. For this reason, the living bring their own rituals to a standstill: to welcome the newly loosed spirit, the living will not clean, will not wash or tidy, will not remove the soul’s belongings for forty days, hoping that sentiment and longing will bring it home again, encourage it to return with a message, with a sign, or with forgiveness.
The Tiger's Wife begins with this meditation on death and the superstitions and rituals surrounding it in an unnamed Balkan country (presumably the author's native Croatia). It then proceeds to weave together the journey of a modern and scientific narrator, Natalia Stefanovi, who is on a quest to solve the mystery surrounding her grandfather's death, with the folkloric stories that ran through his life like "secret rivers". This leads to a strange tension in the book: While Natalia, as a doctor, is distressed to see people treating their sick children with traditional medicines and refusing to bring them into her temporary clinic, she is also concerned with the journey of her grandfather's soul and volunteers to perform a ritual burial for another family, hoping to somehow test the superstitions. Natalia eventually learns that her grandfather's tale of the tiger's wife was based on fact, leading her to question the truthfulness of his even more fantastic story-- that of the deathless man. I also found a strange tension within myself while reading The Tiger's Wife: For the most part it was a pretty dull read, yet I was interested to see what would happen next; I didn't really want to pick it up, and once reading, I didn't quite want to put it down.
My best friend in high school came from Poland and Kasia had a reserve and bluntness that some people found haughty or even rude. I was close enough to her and her family to see that this was just their manner, they were all warm and welcoming to me in their home, but I have noticed this with other people I meet from Slavic countries-- their directness can easily be mistaken for bad manners. With that in mind, I have to wonder if it's a quirk of Téa Obreht's speaking style, a remnant of her childhood in Belgrade, that caused me to have a lack of emotional connection with the characters in this book. Perhaps a lack of emotion is essential to people from this area-- as Obreht writes it, Natalia has grown up in a time that threatened war, saw war and is dealing with its aftermath. In her grandfather's time, he dealt with world wars. Before that, the people of the area were fending off Ottoman invasions. Does a long history of war leave a people affectless yet obsessed with the preparation of their dead? I have to wonder.
I must confess to not knowing the details of the terrible war that broke up the former Yugoslavia, and Obreht doesn't offer any in this book. She doesn't even name the country she is in and refers simply to "the City", apparently to keep the story universal, but with the pointedly nonuniversal beliefs and practises and fables of the characters in The Tiger's Wife, that seems a bit tricksterish, on the brink of precious. I recently read The Cellist of Sarajevo, and while I thought more could have been done with the amazing true facts of that story, I was affected by its humanity, by the spirit of the characters, and that was missing from this book. What the author does well is descriptive writing:
[She] watched a missile hit the old brick building across the river, the vacuum of sound as the blue light went down, straight down, through the top of the building and then blasted out the windows and the doors and the wooden shutters, the bronze name on the building, the plaques commemorating the dead — all of this followed by the realization, once the smoke cleared, that despite everything, the building didn’t fall, but stood there, like a jawless skull, while people cheered and kissed and, as the newspapers would later point out, started a baby boom.And:
The street below dead-ended in a flattened patch of pale grass, bordered on either side by netless goal frames. A slide and some tire swings had been set up on the lip of a wheat field that caught the afternoon light and held it in a shivering glare. Beyond that lay the graveyard, white crosses turned out toward the sea. The wind had subsided, and the road was deserted except for a single mottled goat, tethered to the fence post of what looked like an enormous metal box opposite the clinic. If the BEER sign braced against an oil drum under the awning was to be believed, this was the bar.The chant of the diggers nicely sums up my feelings about this book:
Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.In examining the history and folklore of her native country, Obreht brings out the body to the light of day, lovingly washes the bones, even "breaking the thighbones, sawing through them with a cleaver so that the body could not walk in death to bring sickness to the living", but to the detriment of the book as a whole, she left the heart behind. The buzz around this book is mostly due to the young age of the author, 25 at the time, and while I don't think that gives her a pass for not creating a perfect (to me) novel this time, I will be interested to see what she comes up with next.
