Three debut novels: Z.Smith, A.Roy, Tea Obreht

Three incredibly confident, assured, capacious debut novels that brought us news of cultures unfamiliar to many readers of English-language fiction: Zadie Smith's White Noise, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and now, though I haven't finished it yet, I'll add Tea Obreht's "The tiger's Wife," each of these novels pushing the boundaries of literary convention, full of humor, a wide range of characters and cultures and voices, strongly driven by plot - and each somewhat different in topic and focus: Smith's about the multiracial cultures of contemporary London, the funniest and most political of the three; Roy's about southern India and the most romantic and lush of the three, and Obreht's about a wartorn Balkan state the most fabulist of the three. As noted in yesterday's post, The Tiger's Wife contains 2 mysteries - why does the narrator's grandfather go to a remote Balkan village to die? What does the tiger roaming the Balkan countryside symbolize? and I will add a 3rd, from section I read last night: who is the man who would not die - whom the grandfather meets in the 50s in a Balkan village stricken by a TB epidemic and again in the 70s in a church among many consigned to death in the crypt? I will take a guess, but we'll see what more we learn about these mysteries along the way: the tiger represents a freedom of space and the man who would not die a freedom of time: each an element of of the spirit of the Balkan country (Croatia presumably) as it tries to endure and heal from civil war.