To be honest, I don’t know if I understood this book. I enjoyed it enough while I was reading it, but whenever I tried to conceptualize in my mind what it was about, the whole thing just seemed too slippery and unformed.
The frame story revolves around a young doctor, Natalia, who is travelling back to an unnamed country in the Balkans, after the region has been torn apart and clumsily reassembled after the civil war. She, and her friend (partner?) Zora are moving into remote villages in order to vaccinate children whose childhoods have been disrupted by the war. Far from home, she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. Her grandfather had been a pivotal part of her childhood, taking her to the zoo to see the tiger, who held a special fascination for her grandfather.
With her grandfather much on her mind, she recalls two stories that her grandfather, also a doctor, had told her. One was of the Tiger’s Wife, a young deaf-mute woman married to a brutal man, who somehow (don’t ask me how) becomes the wife of a tiger that had escaped and was terrorizing the surrounding villages. He had met the Tiger’s Wife as a child. The second story was of the Deathless Man, who warns people that they are about to die, even though he cannot die himself. Her grandfather encounters the Deathless Man several times in his life.
War is an ongoing presence in the book. Natalia is living in the wake of the most recent Balkans war, but war is threaded through her grandfather’s life as well. In the villages, people are digging up the remains of their relatives buried in the fields, and war has claimed the tiger that Natalia visited as a child as well, as it gnaws off its own paws through stress.
The narrative switches backwards and forwards, and even though the individual stories were engaging, eliciting your sympathy for characters who were otherwise unlovely, they do not hang together into a coherent whole- or if they do, I couldn’t detect it. I am not uncomfortable with magic realism but it seemed incongruent in this dark, war-haunted country. If there was a deeper meaning connecting the stories, I couldn’t find it, even though I felt that it was just beyond my grasp.
Very clever, or too tricksy? I think the latter.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: my own bookshelves
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 