The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

“Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man.”

I received The Tiger’s Wife in a big collection of books handed down to me by a friend with good literary taste. I hadn’t heard much about it prior to that. After reading it, I read a couple reviews of it on Cannonball Read because honestly, I couldn’t think of how to go about reviewing it, and I was curious to see how others felt. I think we all had a similar response to it. It’s very well written, but while great big chunks of it are very interesting, a lot of it was quite dull as well.

The Tiger’s Wife tells the story of a doctor named Natalia who is treating sick children in a war-torn Baltic country, along with her friend Zora. She learns that her grandfather has died, after a long illness which he kept hidden from everyone but her. She reminiscences about him, and the stories he told her, and how those stories shaped the two of them — individually as well as their relationship together.

The stories themselves, I enjoyed. Two modern day fairytales: the deathless man, and the tiger’s wife. Really, most of what happened with the grandfather was very compelling. The problem was Natalia: she basically served as a narrative frame for the grandfather’s tales, and I found myself skimming over her parts in an effort to return to her grandfather. And there was a completely unnecessary subplot about her friend Zora. Still, it was worth reading the whole book to learn about deathless man and the tiger’s wife, and there’s no denying that Obreht has a talent with words.