The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

This is a mysterious tale told by a writer who I think is going to be very exciting as she matures. It's set in and around the Balkans, both as they are now and as they were through the last century with all their shifting boundaries, conflicts and political uncertainty. Obreht evokes these places with considerable skill and I could feel the warmth of her summer skies and the chill of her snowy, desolate, winters. One of the most powerful themes that runs through her collections of interlinked stories is that of how people continue to live, damaged, pressurised and constrained, in the midst of events so large that from the outside we tend to regard them as all consuming.

It's helpful and meaningful to be reminded that people continue in the events that the news make so humongous. There is also a clash of modernism and folklore and it's refreshing to see such complex social webs being handled with care. Obreht doesn't declaim any side but lets them breath their own lives.

The different tales she tells are not necessarily wrapped up completely and it's a mark of her confidence as a writer that she can lay out characters whose lives don't wrap up neatly - even if there are tantalising hints that she's a fan of a holistic universe. Her writing itself if frequently beautiful and only occasionally does it feel a little bit too full in its descriptions - I think that this feeling arises because her writing is sometimes slightly mechanical, as if by throwing all the ingredients on the page something moving is sure to emerge. As I say, I think this will fade with maturity.

Obreht's philosophy of stuff (yes that's the technical term) is interesting and the story itself, as it plays out across her nuanced pluralistic epistemological landscape is by turns delightful and moving. Definitely worth a read.