The Tiger's Wife

 I continue working through my stack of books in my locker - nothing from the  prison library and no recent arrival from the interlibrary loan process. Max Godfrey lent me Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife (Random House, 2011) which I finished last evening. Max corrected me on one point about a plot point (and I will excuse my lapse by saying I caught part of the reveal even if I did read too fast and there was a Spades game going on in the room with its attendant noisiness.), I thought the story told and the writign of the story were both quite good.

This is the kind of story I cannot write - I'm not sure Americans can write such a story - which I will label magical realism for all that I understand the term. What else should I call a story with a "deathless man"? We do not have a folk history (we barely know our history per Gore Vidal ) to build upon. I do not have within me to write sentences with this kind of cadence - the kind of spell-binding I recall from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

This is when the most extraordinary thing happens. I hear a sound in the water, and I look up. The rope is moving through the water, rising up, wet. Light is beginning slowly in the east, and I can see the opposite bank of the lake, where the woods come all the way up to the bulrushes. And there he is Gauran Gaile - the deathless man - climbing slowly and wetly out of the lake on the opposite side, his coat completely drenched, water grasses on his shoulders....

p.: The War: Gauran Gaile

A somber episodic Yugoslavian history that cannot help its somber nature. And How about this well-written and thoughtful bit of writing:

...My grandfather's tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger's wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and fails. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it any more.

p. 338

And now Pete T. has lent me Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangiers! 

sch

3/3/20