That The Tiger’s Wife never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic—its agile play with tragic material and with us—because, despite Natalia and her grandfather’s devotion to science and rationality, this is a story that bleeds into fable with the slightest scratch.
Books The Tiger's Wife
- Author
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Tea Obreht
- Year
- 2011
- Publisher
- Phoenix
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Obreht’s storytelling impulse is so powerful that she cannot help devising extensive background histories for a host of secondary characters. These tangents distract attention from the main narrative, but often prove intriguing and contain some of the book’s most enduring images.
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Invoking Odysseus here is deliberate; like the mythic figure, Obreht’s narrative frequently detours into extended flashbacks…
Ron Charles
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The Tiger’s Wife is a frisky tiger cub chasing its tail—it covers a lot of ground, growls a lot, and never quite gets there, but we have fun along the way. What the novel lacks in emotional depth, it makes up for in personality and sheer wackiness.
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Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, The Tiger’s Wife is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.
Our Thoughts
Belgrade’s violent history serves as a constant backdrop to the shifting narrative, which moves between history, folk tale and modern-day drama. The storytelling is captivating and unpretentious, but the work as a whole is little more than the sum of its parts.
— Lily Power
A Cat, A Man, and Two Women
Down There by the Train
Frankenstein