Within the first five minutes of her Question & Answer session on the Miller Forum stage, the Living Writers audience has fallen in love with Téa Obreht. Her mind works quickly, drawing connections between different eras and aspects of her own life and the written work embedded in it in seconds. She attempts to mitigate her own wandering enthusiasm – “I don’t know why I just told you that,” she says bemusedly after recounting an anecdote about animals – but we’re right there with her, traveling down the curious roads from her real Balkan roots to her fictionalized Balkan story, piecing together the fascinating process she went through to get there with smiles on our faces.
After this Q&A, Obreht’s Nov. 7 visit to Muhlenberg culminated in a public reading from The Tiger’s Wife, Obreht’s first and only novel, and Inland, Obreht’s much-anticipated second novel set for a 2019 release. Born in 1985 in Belgrade in what was then known as Yugoslavia, Obreht ultimately settled in the U.S. with her family in 1997 after living in Cyprus and Egypt for a few years. She graduated from USC and earned her MFA at Cornell, where she wrote most of The Tiger’s Wife. The novel was published in 2011 and has won the Orange Prize for Fiction; it was also a finalist for the National Book Award.
Though many students present at the reading and Q&A had only encountered Obreht’s work as part of the Living Writers program (she is the fourth and penultimate author to visit campus this semester), some, like Haley Hnatuk ’20, had deep connections to Obreht’s work that went back to the foundations of their learning.
“The Tiger’s Wife … was the summer reading book for my first high school English class,” Hnatuk said. “Over the summer, we had been asked to go through and mark up pages that stood out to us for various reasons, so my copy of the book is filled with marginalia that captures the way my fresh eyes devoured the story. It also has a whole bunch of ‘big words’ highlighted that I didn’t know at the time. I just absolutely fell in love with the prose … My copy of this book has been sitting on my bedside table for about five years along with a couple other books that I come back to read various sections of.”
This book is magical in more ways than one – set in a nonexistent Balkan province before, during, and after times of war and conflict, The Tiger’s Wife wrestles with family, memory, life and death, among other themes. It’s a novel that’s almost impossible to pin down, but that’s what’s so enchanting about it: it ebbs and flows from timeline to timeline, from story to story. The main narrator is a young doctor named Natalia, whose grandfather’s death triggers the exploration of her memories of him, his own memories and his undiscovered past. Though in the frame timeline Natalia tells of her journey inoculating orphan children in a province fractured by war, there are periodic interruptions of her grandfather’s voice, in which he relates both to Natalia and to the reader his experiences with a “deathless man,” the nephew of Death who can read other’s fates but has none of his own.
Interspersed throughout the book, too, are sections in which the story of the eponymous tiger’s wife comes alive, pieced together by Natalia’s research but told from the perspective of the many characters who exist within it. In this narrative, which takes place during the grandfather’s childhood in the 1940s, a tiger escapes from his zoo enclosure after it is bombed and settles near the grandfather’s remote village, where he is secretly fed by the butcher’s young wife – who ultimately becomes known as “the tiger’s wife” – and is the subject of much horror and fascination on the part of the villagers. Natalia’s grandfather, though, befriends the tiger’s wife when no one else will. The fates of all three of these stories become intertwined in the present-day Natalia, who wanders within them much as the reader does, searching for an answer, for the final piece that will tie them all together.
Though the novel contains elements of the supernatural – the deathless man, for example, and the many folk superstitions Natalia must combat as a doctor – it is rooted in a very real history of conflict between groups in the Balkan peninsula throughout the 20th century.
“One thing that Téa Obreht said was, ‘I didn’t want to write about massacres and ethnic cleansing … I wanted to talk about how people use storytelling to hold and pull their families together.’ This really resonated with me, and I found it to be a crucial quote to understanding her book,” said Caroline Kramer ’20, a Living Writers student. “This story is not just about a woman on a mission to find out the circumstances of her grandfather’s death – it is about creating and finding family ties through stories passed down from generation to generation … Her ability to mix stories together and conclude with such compelling results for the reader is admirable.”
This praise for Obreht’s style is echoed by Kramer’s fellow Living Writers student Siobhan McKenna ’19.
“While reading The Tiger’s Wife and having the context of the horrific atrocities of the Balkan Wars in mind, my reading of the text was very serious,” McKenna said. “During Obreht’s reading, the text appeared much lighter in comparison to my initial reading. I was somewhat surprised by how the dialogue of the characters was in many ways a lot more humorous than what I initially thought. Her reading was enjoyable for this reason and allowed for a different interpretation of the text.”
Enjoyable indeed – Obreht’s reading lent a whole new valence to the book. Lines that before seemed merely to serve as worldbuilding became living entities in and of themselves, Obreht’s intended emphasis shaping them into a lovingly crafted reality. Her voice changed with the introduction of each new character’s dialogue, making the book sound like a one-woman play; the written words floated easily off of her tongue, and she never placed too much weight on any particular turn of phrase. Particularly when reading from one of the deathless man stories, speaking in the grandfather’s voice, Obreht’s creations became conversational, spontaneous, almost disarmingly human. It was an absolute privilege to hear this prose in this way.
Obreht’s responses to student questions were also insightful and sincere – she was engaged with each and every inquirer and expressed interest in what they had to say. When one student asked about the responsibilities of artists who write about tragedies they haven’t necessarily experienced themselves, Obreht responded, “Bear witness. Be honest. And be careful not to exploit.” She also spoke of her experiences in the Balkan peninsula and the aftermath of the wars she was able to avoid: “Borders of the mind can exist for a very long time after physical borders have disappeared … We’re all just trying to find our way, I guess. Trying to find what home is.”
At the same time, Obreht wove her bubbly sense of humor around these moments of seriousness, visibly cringing at things she’d said in past interviews, telling spooky stories of vampire hunting in the Balkan woods, and feigning dramatic anger when a student asked about her upcoming projects: “How dare you!” she bellowed, before apologizing ten times over as the audience roared with laughter.
This new book, Inland, is a bit of a departure from The Tiger’s Wife – it’s set in the American West in the 1800s – but still holds the same charm and familial love that reverberates throughout Obreht’s premiere work. Though Obreht is “delirious from excitement and fear” about this new book, it didn’t come easy. She shared at the Q&A that in the seven years eclipsed from her first book to this one, “nine out of ten” ideas didn’t pan out. Still, Obreht has not allowed the pressure of her early success to crush her creativity.
Perhaps this is why programs like Living Writers are so vital to Muhlenberg students’ understanding of how writing works in the context of the world. As Kramer said:
“Living Writers is important because it reminds us, as students, that these established authors are not so unlike ourselves. When we bring in writers like Danez Smith and Téa Obreht to read their work, we are reminded of the fact that they were once in our positions – that it is not impossible to become accomplished, and that we are all accomplished just for showing up with open ears to listen and receive. It is refreshing to note that the name on the cover of a book has a face and has multiple stories – not just the one we’ve all read.”
Be sure not to miss the final Living Writers event of the semester, featuring acclaimed author Zadie Smith, on Nov. 28.
