The Tiger's Wife

In addition to essays, I also aspire to write fiction.  My problem, one I share with most frustrated wannabe authors is that I can only come up with parts of stories and not the whole thing.  What sets me apart is that I have ideas for characters and settings coming out my ears, but I can’t put together a plot to use them in.  There’s one that features a man that doesn’t  age or need to eat trapped in Leningrad during the 1941-43 siege.  And one in which the protagonist is psychic because he can see another world that makes the right action obvious; the thing is that it’s a better world, happier and more prosperous, and this constant vision and the inability to make it real drives him mad.  I have more detail than this, but that gives the idea.  I have several others floating around, too.

I have no idea what to do with them.  These aren’t stories, really.  Not yet.  I could write short scenes that I have imagined in each of them, but that’s not really a story.  I need something to make them hang together, to produce the sort of change that is necessary to have drama.  It just won’t come.

I have a fondness for books and movies in which nothing happens, the ones that manage to dispense with plot for the most part.  My favorite movie is The English Patient, which manages to have two storylines with minimal plot, just a lot of character interaction.  There are specific events, but they do not themselves depend upon each other.  The dynamic part of the story is just the characters.  They change, and they are what is interesting.  What I only realized recently is that I need to pay more attention to these sorts of stories, and how they go about weaving an interesting tale without a plot.  This, perhaps, is what I need to figure out to advance my own ideas.

Which brings me to The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreah.  Of all of the stories I’ve read in which the plot is marginal, it may have the one that is the most marginal.  The events are that a young woman in the former Yugoslavia after the wars of the 1990s travels across the border from the new Orthodox to the new Catholic country (obviously Serbia and Croatia respectively, but the town names are fictional and country names studiously avoided) to vaccinate some children at an orphanage.  She learns of her grandfather’s death and thinks about his life.  She interacts with some other Serbians digging in the vineyard above the orphanage and learns their story.  She relates a story that her grandfather told her once, and describes some of the rituals they shared when she was growing up.  And she takes a trip to see the village of his youth and learns several other stories, about him and about others.

That’s it.  That’s the entire plotline.  It’s more complex than that, because all of the various threads are woven together in a fashion that is at times deliberately obscure, but that’s the entire plot distilled.  I can relate it to you and not spoil a thing about the book, because the plot is entirely incidental.  What’s important isn’t what happens.  It’s the stories that are told. 

The two stories around which the book is centered are the one her grandfather told her, that of The Deathless Man and the story of his youth, that of The Tiger’s Wife, that she must discover for herself.  Those stories I won’t relate, because watching them unfold in bits and pieces is magical.  The secondary stories that populate the edge of those two are also crucial, such as that of Luka the butcher and Daniša the Bear.

The genre of the book is magical realism.  The stories all contain elements that are magical, or mystical or at least mythical.  Taken at face value, they would indicate that this is a fantasy world, perhaps akin to something from Charles de Lint.  The question the book poses, or at least one of them, is whether or not we should take them as literal.  What is real; what is fake; what the difference between those two states is; and whether any of that matters. 

I can’t remember who said it, but there is a claim that there are only two plots in all of fiction: Boy Meets Girl and A Stranger Comes to Town.  Every story is just a variation on one of those plots.  In this case, both are present.  Beyond that, I would claim that there is really only one theme in all of literature: What Does It Mean to Be Human?  Tales explore that question to varying degrees of depth and it obviously has a near infinite number of facets to look at.  The Tiger’s Wife breaks it down to some of its most fundamental levels, but it very deliberately provides little answer.  Human is as human does, you might say. 

That’s of a piece with the storytelling style.  Obreah does her readers the compliment of assuming that we can draw obvious conclusions.  It becomes clear that there is a tie between the story of The Deathless Man and that of The Tiger’s Wife beyond merely the grandfather’s presence in both.  Obreah never states it explicitly, but it is there.  It’s a touch that I very much appreciate.