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A Fierce Debut
An Interview with Téa Obreht, Author of The Tiger’s Wife from our 2011 Winter Newsletter
Téa Obreht Book Talk & Signing
at Bookshop Santa Cruz
Friday, January 13th at 7:30pm
at Bookshop Santa Cruz
Friday, January 13th at 7:30pm
At the age of 24, Téa Obreht appeared in the New Yorker’s list of the top 20 writers under 40. She was the youngest writer on the list. A year later, when her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife won the Orange Prize, she had the distinction of being the youngest-ever winner in that prize’s history.
We are delighted that Téa Obreht will be joining us at Bookshop Santa Cruz for a book talk and signing on January 13th in celebration of the paperback release of her novel. Recently, our bookseller Kat had the opportunity to ask Ms. Obreht a few questions. You’ll find their conversation below, after Kat’s enthusiastic recommendation.
I first came across The Tiger’s Wife when it was excerpted in the 2010 Best American Nonrequired Reading. I assumed it was a short story, and when I realized it was in fact only a fragment of a much longer novel, I was ecstatic. The book exceeded every considerable expectation. The protagonist, Natalia, is a young doctor who decides to cross the border of a war zone in order to deliver vaccinations to an orphanage. Not long into her journey, she learns that her beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has died under mysterious circumstances, far from home. Her ill-advised goodwill mission turns into an undertaking to find out how and why her grandfather died. Along the way, Natalia remembers brilliant stories told to her by her grandfather, including that of a tiger that escaped a bombed-out zoo and terrorized the rural village where he grew up. The novel is a perfect blending of folklore and realism, magic and clear-eyed remembrance. The sheer perfection of each sentence knocked me off my feet.
KAT: I’ve read that you began working on The Tiger’s Wife while you were an MFA student at Cornell. What was the genesis of this project? What was the reaction of your fellow students?
TÉA: The project was born out of a winter afternoon’s nature documentary binge. There was a tiger special on the National Geographic channel, and I found myself feverishly drawn to the story behind a Russian woman and her connection to two Siberian tigers she had helped raise in captivity since their infancy. Later that week, I finished “The Tiger’s Wife,” a short story about a young deaf-mute circus performer and a young boy who observes her search for an escaped tiger. It failed miserably as an exercise in craft, and I distinctly remember my good friend Alexi Zentner (author of Touch) saying: “This has actual pitchforks in it. A story that is not Frankenstein should never have pitchfork-wielding peasants.” But I was hooked, and it grew from there.
KAT: You write very poignantly about the effects of a long-term war on the people who are not necessarily fighting. One particular passage in The Tiger’s Wife describes young adults who find themselves bereft of conflict once the war they’ve grown up with has ended, and struggle for identity and worthiness. What informed this perspective for you?
TÉA: I’ve been going back to Serbia and Croatia since 2003, reconnecting with childhood friends there, and I absorbed a real feeling of restlessness, a desire for significant change and real meaning among those of my generation. I think this found its way very naturally into chapters dealing with the war.
KAT: I completely love the Deathless Man—I love his balance of humanity and enigma. What inspired this character, and how did he develop?
TÉA: Thank you! He’s drawn from a figure of German and Russian folktale, a sort of buffoon who tricks or cheats death and is then punished. I was fascinated by the idea of immortality as punishment—especially because, at that time in my life, I really couldn’t conceive of it as anything but a real gift. He was intended to be a very sinister character, lots of dry-ice entrances in gloomy settings, but as time went on he really became a sad, funny, comforting presence in the book, and I found that his significance in the grandfather’s life and the world of the novel as a whole really changed.
KAT: What else would you like to write? Do you have any secret desire to surprise everyone with a completely different project? Maybe an epic fantasy about
dragons, or a 900-page history of sunflowers?
TÉA: As a teenager, I actually spent significant hours writing epic dragon fantasies. I would get about halfway through, become distracted, and start again from scratch, only to realize I was writing the same thing over and over just so I could cultivate romantic tensions between stock leads. So far, any new form of writing has helped me on a craft level, so I’d love to try my hand at something wildly different—like screenwriting, though I sincerely doubt I’d get along in a medium where I would be banned from extensive description.
KAT: What are the books that make you want to write,
and why?
TÉA: Any page out of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is enough to make me—at the very least—sit down at my desk. Revisiting my favorite books—The Master and Margarita; Love in the Time of Cholera; Out of Africa—also makes me want to write, but this exuberance is quickly followed by an urge to set fire to everything I’ve completed.
