My trouble with The Tiger's Wife

Some further thoughts on Tea Obreht's novel "The Tiger's Wife": as readers of these posts may have noted, I tend to prefer novels that are in the realist/naturalist style, and that I don't particularly care for experimental narratives or fabulists or fantasies or, for that matter, historical fiction for the most part. As noted previously, I like many things about The Tiger's Wife, but I think it became a little unbalanced in the second half of the novel: Obreht started out with a fairly traditional, realistic first-person narrative: the narrator, Natalia, a 20ish doctor, is traveling with another young doctor - her friend? lover? never clear - named Zora to deliver medicine to an orphanage across the border, in the country - Serbia? Croatia? - that was recently enemy territory. She learns from a phone call that her beloved grandfather, also a doctor, has just died under mysterious circumstances - and I thought the book was off to a great start: will she deliver the meds? what happened to her grandfather? how will Natalia resolve her family obligations and her medical commitments? In first few chapters, we see he arrive in the village near the orphanage, meet a family that will host her, learn a little about the village history, confront some strange people who are digging up the soil in the vineyard in hopes of finding an abandoned corpse - and we also in "flashback" learn about her youth with her grandfather. Each of these sections tells us in some way about a different era in the long history of the Balkan wars - though Obreht is intentionally and sometimes maddeningly vague about the historical details - she clearly wants this to be a story about universals and not about the particulars of one time and place. Where the novel starts to fall apart, in my view, is that as it goes along we read more and more about the tales and fables her grandfather relates and less and less about what's happening in the present - ultimately, the fables seemed the weaker part of the mix, and the novel began to lose me. Obreht had a chance, I think, to bring it all together - if the fables had a big payoff that could really bring us back into the present and resolve the mysteries of grandfather's death, the diggers and their search for a body, and most of all: Natalia and her friends and family. It's as if the fabulist element, rather than clarify things for me, just occluded the story and made it difficult for me to know who is Natalia? What is she writing about? Where is she coming from? It's as if the fables are a way for Obreht to avoid the difficult work of really opening up the narrator's character, making her real and complete, and resolving the plot in a credible and satisfying way. She abandons the best part of the story and takes refuge in fantasy: where anything goes because anything can be imagined. It's a good novel, and maybe Book Group tomorrow night will help illuminate some of the more obscure points, but it falls short of its promise of greatness: I'd hope in a future novel that Obreht could open up a little more, really tell the story of families, of a community, struggling to live through a time of war. Parts of this novel show that she has the talent to do it.