Spurred by her recent appearance in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 anthology, and a general buzz among my co-workers, I picked up an advanced copy of Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. I finally finished it late last night, purposefully reading slower as the last pages approached and the back half of the book grew thinner and thinner. I turned off the lamp and just sat in the dark, thinking about it, re-working each plot point and trying to remember the last time a book really got at me so intensely.
The Tiger’s Wife is the finest work of magical realism I have read since I greedily poured over Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school. Like Marquez, Obreht packs an embarrassment of riches into her work. Each chapter of the book is like a Russian nesting doll, revealing smaller and more wondrous stories, each character contains multitudes. Esoterica abounds, and every flashback is full of old-world mysticism and ancient rites largely forgotten in our modern times.
