My book of the year is The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. The minute I read it I predicted it would win the Orange Prize and eagerly made it my opening selection for Book Group back in February. As so much of my reading is dictated by reviews, I tend to only buy novels by debut authors as my way of supporting them. The Tiger’s Wife is now my all time favourite debut. So thank you Jonathan Safran Foer Everything is illuminated (2002) for topping my personal charts for the past eight years.
So, why this book? It’s quite simply a work of immense beauty and imagination that weaves together folklore, allegories and eccentric characters against the backdrop of a young doctor’s search to discover more about her beloved and recently deceased grandfather. It’s also about a nation’s history, mythologising Yugoslavia in a similar way to Salman Rushdie’s exploration of India in Midnight’s Children. Better still, it’s half the size of Rushdie’s tome. The structure is a little bit like a Russian Doll, with a story inside a story inside a story so that you’re a little unsure what is real and what is made up and where it will all end.
Tracing a family’s experience of war from the Nazi invasion of World War II to the more recent Serbian conflict, there are lots of stories that need to be told. ‘Culture is a whole way of conflict’ wrote Stuart Hall, adapting Raymond Williams’ famous observation. We make sense of the world through these conflicting ideas and so superstition, myth and fact all combine to paint a complex, textured picture of the Balklands. There is no single truth that fits all, particularly in the surreal and irrational world of war. Here stories take on magical qualities. They are ageless. They transcend life and death. They live on through people, transforming each time according to the personality and emphasis of the speaker.
What makes this book such a beautiful read is it’s not just another aftermath of war story. It pulls the reader right inside and asks them what story they want to believe in much the same way that Yann Martel did with The Life of Pi. One particularly striking image was a description of animals eating their offspring in a zoo, locked in as the bombs rained down across the city. Although this may have been a metaphor for Yugoslavia turning in upon itself it was also a powerful reminder of how many marginalised voices go unheard, all of whom are equal in their pain. And of course it’s far easier to rationalise death through abstractions, and perhaps the best way.
Quite remarkably the author is only twenty-five. I can only imagine that she has some very interesting relatives that she wisely took the time to listen to. Now I’ll try and remember that when I visit my ninety-two-year-old grandma over Christmas.