The Tiger's Wife in Around the World

Oct 19, 2010 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: national-book-award-nominees, location-croatia, orange-prize, location-yugoslavia, read2012, around-the-world

This is the first book I read for my Around the World challenge, and what a way to start. The reason I have both Yugoslavia and Croatia listed is that the locations are intentionally unnamed or made up throughout the novel. Obreht does this on purpose to disassociate story from place, since so much of the turmoil in that area of the world is caused by family name endings and minor differences.

The story is about two generations of doctors in a family - the grandfather and the granddaughter, and a ...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Daisy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: eastern-europe, favorites-2nd-place, former-yugoslavia-balkan, eastern-european-challenge-2011, mushrooms

Unforgettably beautiful.
The story lines include Natalia's delivering medicine to orphans in a seaside town after the Balkan war is over, Natalia's memories of her grandfather, and her grandfather's stories. This isn't magical realism, it's more like realistic magic. The writing is piercing and gorgeous, the story is riveting. It's so ingeniously crafted and interwoven, and although the cities and towns in the novel are made up, the history of the former Yugoslavia is present and vivid. (I get a Unforgettably beautiful.
The story lines include Natalia's delivering medicine to orphans in a seaside town after the Balkan war is over, Natalia's memories of her grandfather, and her grandfather's stories. This isn't magical realism, it's more like realistic magic. The writing is piercing and gorgeous, the story is riveting. It's so ingeniously crafted and interwoven, and although the cities and towns in the novel are made up, the history of the former Yugoslavia is present and vivid. (I get all my history from fiction.)

In his free hand, my grandfather is carrying the blue bag my grandma has prepared for us. In it: six-day-old cabbage heads for the hippopotamus, carrots and celery for the sheep and deer and the bull moose, who is a kind of phenomenon. In his pocket, my grandfather has hidden some sugar cubes for the pony that pulls the park carriage. I will not remember this as sentimentality, but as greatness. p. 4

"When men die, they die in fear," he said. "They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living--in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand--but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on your own. Do you understand?" p. 154

When your fight has purpose--to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent--it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling--when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event--there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it. p. 283

... [his] eyes steady and resigned, all the fight pulled out of him by something no one present completely understood, but everyone would later relegate to responsibility, to the grace of self-sacrifice. p. 323
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