Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife
An admission: I love fables and allegories. And tigers. But I’m not keen on books set during or around war (Birdsong is one of my least favourite novels of all time and I couldn’t get through the first 100 pages of The Book Thief). So it’s taken me a little while to weigh these against each other and reach the conclusion that I’d like to read Téa Obreht’s debut and this year's Orange prize-winner.
Here’s what I mean.
The following, nicked from the blurb on the author’s website, really doesn’t do it for me: “In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea.”
But then… “She turns to the stories [her grandfather] told her when she was a child. On their weekly trips to the zoo he would read to her from a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which he carried with him everywhere; later, he told her stories of his own encounters over many years with “the deathless man,” a vagabond who claimed to be immortal and appeared never to age.”
Deathless man? Jungle Book? Hells yes.
I hope to add The Tiger’s Wife to my top tiger book faves (The Tiger-Skin Rug, Life of Pi and of course The Jungle Book), but I’m reminded that it doesn’t pay to be so black and white about these things. Not all tiger books have teeth… I was kind of tepidly enthusiastic about The White Tiger and will probably never read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (although I agree neither of these are, strictly speaking, about actual tigers). And war stories? Catch 22… fantastic. Birds without Wings… epic, moving, wonderful.
Taking the list to:
Three Balkan tigers
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