The Tiger's Wife: End

I had really high expectations of this novel because of the many reviews I read before starting it, but now that I've finished it, my feelings are mixed.

The content of the novel is unusual, making many moments in it wondrous. The many small scenes that Tea Obreht writes escalate to produce a wise and beautiful creation. I am still amazed by how well Obreht's writing flows. I have noticed that many authors feel the need to rapidly and constantly change their sentence structures, consequently interrupting the flow of my reading. In this case, Obreht's delicately written sentences ran smoothly, which was refreshing.

I can't exactly figure out exactly what I didn't like about the novel. I think it may have been the fact that all of the different stories weren't cleanly connected at the end. Each of the stories are well written, but when put together it is difficult to see that the man who dealt with Gavran Gailé is the same grandfather described in his interactions with Natalia. Some of the reviews I read expressed disappointment in the emotional disconnection between the reader and the characters. I think that this was done intentionally, but I can't argue with the fact that the story would have felt more whole if I could have understood Natalia's grandfather better.

What touched me the most in this novel was the presence of war. It runs in the background of the whole story. The villagers are paranoid, which causes leisure activities to stop because, according to the them, why do anything when there is a war going on? War seeps into the land and the cities that the characters of the story live in. While the tiger lurks the hills of the village, he adds to the fear that the villagers feel, but gives them something to focus on instead. As students learn about war in school, but no one really knows what it's like unless they've seen it. Having lived in a country that was once tainted with battlefields, I have an idea of the horror that it brings; however, all I have seen are the after-effects and leftover battlefields, so I can only attempt to imagine the true terror that civilians feel while war takes place around them. The Tiger's Wife gives readers an idea of the strange behaviour that can go on in the midst of all the sadness, which I, for one, am happy to have understood. 

Although I didn't love the whole novel, it is something that I will likely never forget. I''ll be keeping an eye out for Téa Obreht's next release, and hoping that it is something as rich as her first. Great writing is the kind that leaves you breathless, and that happened to me multiple times while reading The Tiger's Wife.