The Tiger's Wife

I guess I liked The Tiger's Wife, the bestselling novel by Téa Obreht, most because it reminded me of so many other novels. I don't mean that it's unoriginal, for it's fiercely imaginative and fresh, but rather that it created an intertexuality within my own mind as it spoke to other novels I love: The Deathless Man recalled the Golem in Kavalier and Clay, a wandering phantom that embodies the shadow side of human life and belief, but one who is conscious of his fate, like Melquiades from One Hundred Years of Solitude.. The tiger seemed so much like the tiger in Life of Pi, a reminder of the beast within and the veneer of domestication, of our uneasy relationship with our wild and gentle selves. The post-tragedy setting, the suspicion, the heavy sense of collective loss kept taking me back to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, reminding me how we often choose weight over escape, even as it causes us pain. At great risk, Natalia sets out to find not so much answers but meaning, not like a detective but more like an innocent, like Kundera's Teresa. The historical context, a cycle of tolerance and destruction among peoples, seems so much like the inevitable demise of the Buendias, though Albrecht's ending is not as brutal as García Márquez'. And the way the magical elements mesh with the realistic and historical narratives reminds me of the stories that speak loudest to me, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, Shakespeare's Tempest, Helprin's Winter's Tale, Borges' Labyrinths, even Wicked. There are many readers and critics who label works like The Tiger's Wife as fables, suggesting that the animal characters and heavy hand of destiny reduce the work to childish moral allegory. Instead, to me it is these features that bring the work into the archetypal, a landscape of the familiar, where our actions and experiences, however strange, make sense.