Book Review | The Tiger's Wife

Much hype and controversy surround book awards, but on the plus side, they increase awareness about the huge number of books which are published worldwide each year. In the UK, probably the three best known awards are the Man Booker, the Orange Prize and the Costa award.

The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996, and is awarded yearly to a novel written in English by a woman of any nationality. Often derided as sexist and discriminatory, it was set up because women authors, even some of the most successful, were often excluded from the 'canon' and critical acclaim which were mainly reserved for male authors.

But is it still needed now? I have ambiguous feelings about 'women only' literary prizes, as I have for anything which ghettoises women away from the mainstream. Should they not be compared to their male contemporaries? Especially now, when more and more women are getting on the Booker short list - Trezza Azzopardi's The Hiding Place was shortlisted in 2000 - while others won the prize: Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Anne Enright and Kiran Desai.

This year's Orange Prize for Fiction was won by Tea Obreht with her debut novel The Tiger's Wife. At just 26, she is the youngest ever to win this prize. She was born in Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia and raised in Belgrade. Her family moved first to Cyprus in 1992 and then to Egypt, and eventually emigrated to the US in 1997.

Powerful novels have come away with the Orange Prize, foremost among them, Lionel (real name Margaret Ann) Shriver with We Need to Speak About Kevin, but I do not think that The Tiger's Wife falls in the same category.  

I was drawn to this book partly because of the author's background, but I find that it does not stand up to all the hype that it has generated. I have the suspicion that most, including myself, were amazed that the author could be such an excellent storyteller at such a young age.

In effect, this is what her book is about. It is about storytelling, set in an unnamed Balkan country (former Yugoslavia), recently ravaged by war.  

It has three main plot lines, which are loosely fused together and which clearly started as three separate stories: the story of the Tiger's Wife originally written for a workshop, the story of the Deathless Man, and the story of the special relationship between the narrator, Natalia and her grandfather.

The young doctor Natalia, on a mercy mission to an orphanage, on learning about her beloved grandfather's death remembers the stories he used to tell her about his search for the deathless man, and the story of the tiger's wife. Obreht mixes realism and fantasy, the latter acting as a coping mechanism for grim reality. A wealth of myth and folklore, magic and superstition are present in these stories.

The first half of the book is a joy to read but in the second half the reader will feel lost. The stories are not structured in a controlled manner and so do not come together as a novel. Tea Obreht, who in spite of her young age, has a background of short story writing, would have done better to present this book as a collection of short stories.

The Tiger's Wife is more a work of the imagination than actual observation of the war torn years of Yugoslavia. Obreht's emphasis is more on style than emotion.

However there are many episodes - the tiger's escape from the bombed zoo, reminiscent of the scene from Kustirica's film Underground, the old man having the last meal at the restaurant which will go up in flames together with the old bridge (Mostar) - will be remembered long after reading the novel.  

In truth, perhaps one is expecting too much from a young girl, who has lived most of her life away from her native country, to succeed in putting the complexities of Yugoslavia's recent past into a coherent whole.

Tea Obreht has a great talent for story telling and a rich imagination, which augurs well for her future as a writer. Underlying this 'novel' one can detect a brilliant collection of short stories.