The Tiger's Wife

Téa Obreht was twenty-five when The Tiger's Wife won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011, making her the youngest winner the award had ever had. The novel moves between a modern coast town, a war-scarred border region and an isolated mountain village, and it refuses to choose between the rational and the magical. It offers readers a young doctor, a deathless man, a runaway zoo tiger and a butcher's silent wife, and it asks us to hold all of them as equally real.

A Doctor's Education

Natalia Stefanović is a young doctor working in a city that the novel never names, somewhere in the Balkans, after a series of wars. Her closest teacher was her grandfather, also a doctor, a rational man who believed in medicine, order and careful thought, and who also told her stories about a man who could not die and about a deaf girl who befriended a tiger. Natalia grew up assuming she understood the stories. She assumed that the girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one was, in some way, her.

Then the grandfather dies. He has died in a village called Zdrevkov, far from home, while telling the strangers around him that he was on his way to visit his granddaughter, who was working nearby with an international clinic. Natalia is not working there. She is on a volunteer mission with her best friend, Zóra, vaccinating orphans at a monastery in Brejevina, a coastal town in a neighboring country, when the news reaches her. She keeps the death from Zóra for a while, because talking about it makes it real, and because her grandmother, back in the city, is waiting for the grandfather's belongings. Local custom says the soul lingers forty days, and the grandmother intends to observe every one of them properly.

So the novel runs on several tracks at once. Natalia treats children at the monastery, negotiates with their superstitious guardians, and begins to investigate, through letters and memories, what her grandfather was doing in Zdrevkov. Her medical work and her grief are the same motion: diagnosing the dead the way she would diagnose a patient.

The Zoo Tiger

The oldest track begins in April of 1941, when German bombs fall on the city for three days without warning. In a fortress zoo on the citadel, an escaped tiger survives because something in his blood forces him to his feet. He was born in a travelling circus and spent years in a cage, fed fresh meat twice a day, and he does not know what bombs are. He slips through a gap in the ruined wall and walks out into a flattened city, past wrecked coffeehouses, over fallen trolleys, down toward the river. He sees looters and the looters see him and think he is a joke, a hallucination, a religious vision.

For months he wanders north, eating carcasses in the marshes, losing teeth to mange, learning to hunt out of necessity rather than instinct. By the end of November, in the first snow, he reaches the ridge above a mountain village called Galina, where a herdsman named Vladisa loses a calf and comes face to face with him. Vladisa runs down into the village square screaming that the Devil has come, and the villagers do not believe him until a nine-year-old boy speaks up. The boy has been reading a brown volume given to him by the village doctor, a copy of The Jungle Book, and he recognizes the animal from the dog-eared picture of Shere Khan. The boy is Natalia's grandfather. The book becomes the hinge of the entire story.

The Butcher's Wife

In Galina there is a butcher named Luka, a tall, resentful man with a ruined musical career behind him. He had trained as a guslar, a singer of epic songs, and had spent years in the city and abroad, dreaming of a life on the stage. When his father died, he was summoned home to take up the family trade, and the village, which never quite trusted him, decided he must have vices to hide: gambling, women, or a preference for men. To cover himself, according to the talk, he married a girl who could tell no one anything. She was deaf, she was Muslim in a Christian village, and she was thirteen years old the day they wed. Some said her father handed her over to settle a debt. Others said Luka bought her at a market in Istanbul and brought her home like a piece of luggage.

Whatever the truth, Luka beats her. The village knows and does nothing. Then the tiger starts appearing behind the smokehouse at night, and meat starts disappearing from the smokehouse stores, and the deaf girl, it turns out, has been feeding him. She goes out in the dark and leaves Luka's cuts of meat where the tiger will find them, and the tiger comes closer and closer to the house. On Christmas Eve, the grandfather spots a light in the smokehouse and creeps up the ramp to warn whoever is inside about the tiger. The light goes out. In the dark, something enormous moves past him, brushing the hanging hooks, and the boy, thinking of Mowgli taunting Shere Khan, puts out a hand and touches the coarse fur as it passes. The tiger leaves. The girl comes and kneels beside him, smelling of snow, pine and blood, and helps him up before Luka arrives with a cleaver and the whole village pours out to follow the tracks.

There is only one gun in Galina, kept by the blacksmith, and the men take it up the mountain on Christmas Day. The hunt becomes the novel's blackest comedy. The tiger is found by a frozen pond, eating Luka's pork shoulder. The blacksmith, a terrified man convinced he is doomed by an old family curse, fires and misses. He reloads, fumbles, and while the tiger crosses the ice toward him, blows his own head off with a misfire. Luka and Jovo, the only witnesses, hide in a tree and watch the tiger drag the body away, then return home and lie about the blacksmith's bravery for years, spawning a legend about a heroic death that never happened. The tiger, meanwhile, has learned the taste of human meat.

Luka knows exactly whose meat the tiger was eating. That night he dislocates his wife's shoulder, presses her hands onto the stove and ties her up in the smokehouse, half hoping the tiger will come and finish her. Not long after, he disappears. No one notices for days, and no one ever learns what happened, though the narrator sides with the villagers who imagine him waking to find his wife kneeling at the foot of the bed, wrists skinned raw, holding the blacksmith's gun against his mouth. The girl comes to town two weeks later in Luka's fur coat, buys Turkish silks, smiles at everyone, and lets the village stare. Her belly is growing. From that moment on, the villagers have a name for her: the tiger's wife.

The Deathless Man

The grandfather's other lifelong story concerns a man named Gavran Gailé, whom he first meets as a young man when he is studying medicine. Gavran Gailé drinks coffee with the dying and reads their fates in the grounds at the bottom of the cup. He claims to be the nephew of Death, cursed with immortality because he once broke an agreement to save the woman he loved. The grandfather, a rationalist, treats him as a fraud and wagers with him, testing whether he can die. He cannot. The two men meet again and again across decades and across wars, in different towns under changing flags, and Gavran Gailé always looks exactly the same age. The wager between them comes to involve a battered copy of The Jungle Book, the same volume the grandfather carried through his childhood. Late in the grandfather's life, the deathless man appears once more, and the terms of the old bet finally come due.

In the novel's present tense, this thread pays off in an unexpected way. Natalia learns that her grandfather's last journey was not a visit to her at all. He was chasing the deathless man, or the possibility of him, into a war zone as an old man with a bad heart. The beloved rationalist spent his final days on a fool's errand out of a fairy tale, and he died among strangers, and he left it to his granddaughter to decide what any of it meant.

The Diggers

Back in Brejevina, Natalia and Zóra stay with an innkeeper named Barba Ivan and his wife, Nada, whose son, Fra Antun, runs an orphanage out of a former monastery. Nada is carrying a grief of her own: her other son, Arlo, was murdered at fifteen, and the family's pain radiates through every polite exchange. In the vineyard behind the house, a family named Duré has been digging for weeks. Their cousin died in the war and was buried in a field, and his body was never recovered, and the children of the family are falling ill one by one because, as Duré sees it, the dead man's soul cannot rest. The family has carried his heart, wrapped in cloth, from the burial place, and the ritual requires them to lay the heart at a crossroads and let the mora, the spirit, find it. Natalia offers medicine. Duré offers a bargain: she can treat the sick children her way if he can bury the heart his way. She takes it, and the mystery is left open in the way that real places leave these things open.

When the grandfather's effects finally arrive from Zdrevkov, Natalia goes through them and notices what is not there. Every ordinary object of a doctor's late life has made the journey, but the brown volume of The Jungle Book has vanished, and no one can explain where it went. The missing book unsettles her more than anything else, because it belongs to both of her grandfathers at once: the village boy who identified a tiger in the snow and the city physician who taught her to trust evidence. If the deathless man's wager ever had a physical token at its center, the book was it. Its absence is the closest the novel comes to an answer about what an old man with a failing heart was really doing in a war zone at the end of his life.

Natalia's search for her grandfather's story eventually takes her to Galina itself, where she finds the village disappearing into the hills, an old veterinarian who knew the boy, and the last traces of the tiger's wife. She also learns the ending that her grandfather never told her as a bedtime story. The villagers, terrified and ashamed, hired a hunter, a taxidermist who traveled the mountains killing animals so he could make them stand still forever. He set traps for the tiger. The deaf girl found the traps and broke them. When the hunter caught her sabotaging his work and attacked her, the young grandfather, who followed the girl everywhere when no one else dared go near her, struck out to protect her and killed the hunter by accident. After that came a poisoned potion and a dead sixteen-year-old girl, and a public hanging for the apothecary who had treated her, and a boy who carried both deaths into a life of medicine. He became a doctor, the novel suggests, partly in atonement for what he did with a boy's strength in a superstitious village.

A Story with a Hundred Wives

The Tiger's Wife is a war novel in which the wars mostly happen offstage, in the gaps between stories. Cities are bombed, borders move, a family digs for a cousin in a vineyard, and the living keep trying to give the dead a proper place to rest. Obreht braids the present-day narrative with the grandfather's memories and with the folklore of Galina, and she refuses to tell the reader which version wins. The tiger's wife gets a hundred versions because telling stories is what the village does with what it cannot explain, and the novel treats that as neither pure wisdom nor pure foolishness.

The book succeeded at a level that is hard to overstate. Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985 and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before her family moved to the United States in 1997. She wrote most of the novel while she was at Cornell University, and The New Yorker published a version of the tiger chapter in 2009, before the book existed. The finished novel came out in March 2011 from Weidenfeld & Nicolson in Britain and The Dial Press in the United States, and it won the Orange Prize that June, at twenty-five, the youngest winner to that point. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and reviewers reached, reasonably, for comparisons to Bulgakov and García Márquez. The book is a debut, and it reads like a lifetime of stories arriving at once. Its pieces refuse to fit together neatly, which is exactly the point: a grandfather, a granddaughter, a tiger and a hundred different wives, all of them still walking.