The multiple strands of The Tiger's Wife: allusive, and elusive

I admire a lot about Tea Obreht's debut novel, "The Tiger's Wife," as is obvious from many of these posts. She has a great story-telling ability and a crisp and clear writing style illuminated by many striking similes and perceptions. I have to say that The TW was a bit of a disappointment at the end - Obreht has grand ambitions, which I admire - so much more ambitious and thoughtful than most first novels, which are often just obliquely presented memoirs - as she takes on the great themes of war, reconciliation, and memory. Some of the novel, particularly in the first half, is a surface narrative about a young doctor in an unnamed Baltic state just after the tenuous peace agreement takes weak hold; gradually the novel becomes more dominated by stories and fables, related to the narrator, Natalia, by her grandfather, a doctor who has died just before the start of the novel. The element that drives the plot is her need to find out why her grandfather traveled to a remote village to die She, or we, or I lost site of this over the course of the novel, and the 2nd half is a series of loosely linked village stories about an escaped tiger, a woman who befriends the tiger, her abusive husband, other villagers called in to help stalk and kill the target - and other slightly related tales about the "deathless man" who, toward the end, we realize is something like an angel of death, come to earth to name and claim his victims. It's very hard for me to fathom the meaning of all of these tales - and I'm not sure whether Obreht really intends us to find them literally meaningful or just atmosphere and evocative. In notes at the end of the pb edition she talks about her need to not explain everything in the novel, but I have to wonder whether it's all explicable, or if it's a loose connection of stories and events unified by a sense of place and by a single narrative voice? This will be a good book for book group to take on, and we'll see if multiple readers can make sense, or more sense, of the multiple narrative strands that Obreht has tossed us. Lots of great material here, but I'm not sure that Obreht really has command of all of the elements she's released. Maybe we can explicate all of the symbolism - but how much does an author owe her readers? It's OK to expect us to do some of the interpretive work - many of our greatest works of fiction are difficult and allusive (and elusive) - but we do need to be confident that in probing the meanings we'll arrive at a greater whole, a more profound understanding of the entire work.